For some goods, the main cost of buying the product is not the price but rather the time it takes to use them. Only about 0.2% of consumer spending in the U.S., for example, went for Internet access in 2004 yet time use data indicates that people spend around 10% of their entire leisure time...

In this paper we examine the importance of local spillovers such as network externalities and learning from others in the diffusion of home computers using data on 110,000 U.S. households in 1997. Controlling for many individual characteristics, we find that people are more likely to buy their...

This paper documents the rise of the Internet as a source of cigarette tax competition for states in the United States. Using data on cigarette tax rates, taxable cigarette sales and individual smoking rates by state from 1980 to 2005 merged with data on Internet penetration, the paper documents...

Resource misallocation can lower aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). We use micro data on manufacturing establishments to quantify the extent of this misallocation in China and India compared to the U.S. in recent years. Compared to the U.S., we measure sizable gaps in marginal products...

In the 1988-2004 micro data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the CPI, price changes are frequent (every 4-7 months, depending on the treatment of sale prices) and large in absolute value (on the order of 10%). The size and timing of price changes varies considerably for a...

Despite the interest in measuring price sensitivity of online consumers, most academic work on Internet commerce is hindered by a lack of data on quality. In this paper we use publicly available data on the sales ranks of about 20,000 books to derive quantity proxies at the two leading online...

This paper takes a retrospective look at the U.S. government’s effort to rescue and restructure General Motors and Chrysler in the midst of the 2009 economic and financial crisis. The paper describes how two of the largest industrial companies in the world came to seek a bailout from the U.S....

In 2001, the IRS issued a ruling allowing firms to engage in nontaxable real estate investment trust (REIT) spin-offs. In a REIT spin-off, a corporation places real estate assets into a subsidiary, which it then distributes to shareholders as a REIT. A nontaxable spin-off triggers no immediate...