We consider a two period model in which an incumbent political party chooses the level of a current policy variable unilaterally, but faces competition from a political opponent in the future. Both parties care about voters payoffs, but they have different beliefs about how policy choices will...

This paper presents a method for estimating treatment effects of regulations when treated and control firms compete on the output market. We develop a GMM estimator that recovers reduced-form parameters consistent with a model of differentiated product markets with multi-plant firms, and use...

We develop a procedure to estimate production functions, elasticities of demand, and productivity when firms endogenously select into multiple destination markets where they compete imperfectly, and when researchers observe output denominated only in value. We show that ignoring the...

This paper shows that even moderate air pollution levels, such as those in Europe, harm the economy by reducing firm performance. Using monthly firm-level data from France, we estimate the causal impact of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) on sales and worker absenteeism. Leveraging exogenous...

Recent theoretical work in the economics of climate change has suggested that climate policy is highly sensitive to fat-tailed' risks of catastrophic outcomes (Weitzman, 2009b). Such risks are suggested to be an inevitable consequence of scientific uncertainty about the effects of increased...

A significant and growing share of US agricultural output is produced under a production or marketing contract. An important controversy regarding agricultural production contracts is the control of non-labor inputs. Over time, contracts have tended to place more inputs under the buyer's control...

When liability for environmental spills, product failures, or other types of accidents is imposed on firms with insufficient wealth, those firms may file for bankruptcy ---thereby becoming ''judgement proof''--- as soon as a major accident occurs. As a result, they are unlikely to choose...

Superfund cleanup has been extremely slow. Traditional analysis has centred around reducing the heavy negotiation and litigation to expedite the cleanup process. This paper investigates other factors which provide possible incentives for the PRPs to delay the cleanup, namely discounting, risk...