This paper examines how consumers react to the financial distress of durable goods manufacturers by looking at the Swedish new car market. We employ a difference-in-differences matching methodology whereby we compare sales of carmaker Saab with those of a carefully constructed control group of...

The empirical literature points to a stylized phenomenon of increased demand for hope following adversity. Clotfelter and Cook (1989) suggest that hope is a key sentiment underpinning recreational gambling. Chew and Ho (1994, this journal) offer the view of hope being experienced in lottery...

As much of the world goes searching for alternative sources of energy to oil, Brazil's three-decade experience in developing a successful substitute for gasoline merits attention. Brazil is the only sizable economy to date to have developed a ubiquitously distributed alternative to oil-based...

I begin by fitting traditional gravity equations to document that regional flows in the Brazilian cement industry exhibit gravity-like structure, with cement trade decaying sharply in distance traveled. I then show that this large distance effect owes to firms' strategic behavior over and above...

This paper estimates a structural model of the Brazilian carbonated soft drink industry to test the claim that the observed low prices of low-end entrants owe to marginal cost advantages over the large, established brands, allegedly stemming chiefly from tax evasion. Such entrants, numbering in...

We examine day-to-day fluctuations in worker-level output over 15 months for a panel of 98 manufacturing workers at a plant located in an industrial city in Hebei province, north China. Long-term workers earn piece-rate wages, with no base pay or minimum pay, for homogeneous tasks performed over...

Little is known about how children of high-income expatriate families, often from rich nations, adapt to temporary residence in a severely polluted city of the developing world. We use a six-year panel of 6,500 students at three international schools in a major city in north China to estimate...

We examine Singapore's fairly homogeneous private-housing market and show that new apartments on historical multi-century leases trade at a non-zero discount relative to property owned in perpetuity. Descriptive regressions indicate that new apartments with 825 to 986 years of tenure remaining...