In 1955 fewer than 2% of the nation's residences had air conditioning; by 1980 over half were air conditioned, and over a quarter had central air. This paper attempts to explain the growth and the geographic differences in the prevalence of residential air conditioning from the mid fifties to...

At the 1927 meetings of the American Economic Association, Paul Douglas presented a paper entitled "A Theory of Production," which he had coauthored with Charles Cobb. The paper proposed the now familiar Cobb-Douglas function as a mathematical representation of the relationship between capital,...

J7, E3 </AbstractSection> Copyright Biddle and Hamermesh; licensee Springer. 2013

The bandwagon effect is a consumption externality that exists when an individual's demand for a good is increased by his observation of other consumers using that good. This paper models a product demand curve with a bandwagon effect and, using data on sales of personalized license plates,...

The authors present and empirically test a self-selection/job matching model of a common transition in the careers of scientists and engineers-the move from technical to managerial jobs. Technical and managerial ability are assumed to be positively but not perfectly correlated, so that technical...

Using CPS data from 1979-2009 we examine how cyclical downturns and industry-specific demand shocks affect wage differentials between white non-Hispanic males and women, Hispanics and African-Americans. Women's and Hispanics' relative earnings are harmed by negative shocks, while the earnings...