Governments provide public information to reduce information imperfections. Do households rely on public signals to inform themselves about market conditions? To identify the importance of public information in households' price expectations, we take advantage of a unique natural experiment in...

Sunday birth rates in Ecuador have sharply declined, and the drop is larger among young cohorts in urban areas. These trends are attributed to an increase in cesarean births, which are generally scheduled during regular hospital hours. Multiple rounds of Health Surveys confirm that mothers with...

This paper takes advantage of a rich firm level data set from Ecuador to analyze the effects of a reform in 2007 that introduced imprisonment for tax evasion and made a firm’s CFO liable for tax-crimes. Our dataset contains actual tax-return and financial-statement information for the universe...

We use firm-level administrative data from Ecuador to study the implications of 'reverse withholding' for firms' tax behavior. Withholding does not affect tax liability of firms, but it may result in a discontinuity in the audit probability around the withholding threshold. Exploiting variation...

We propose two new indices that measure the evolution of housing market liquidity. The key features of both indices are a) their ability to control for unobserved heterogeneity exploiting repeat listings, b) their use of censored durations (listings that are expired and/or withdrawn from the...

This paper describes the production of a panel of price indices for housing services, other produced goods and services, and all produced goods and services for each metropolitan area in the United States and the non-metropolitan part of each state for each year from 1982 through 2012. Our...

This paper analyzes how the distribution of marketing time of residential real estate evolves across time. Using real estate data from a large suburb in the Washington D.C. area we first show that the whole distribution of marketing time shifts to the right when a “hot” housing market in...

Programs to reduce tra¢ c congestion and air pollution by restricting use of motor vehicles on working days have generally not met with success given existing studies of such programs in a number of cities. We conduct the Örst study of Quito, Ecuadorís three-year-old Pico y Placa program...

The influential contributions of DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux (1996), Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009), Machado and Mata (2005), and Donald, Green, and Paarsch (2000) provide researchers with a useful toolbox to estimate counterfactual distributions of scalar random variables. These techniques...