Providing managers with stock in the firm may help ensure that managers act in the shareholders' interest. The level of managerial stock ownership, however, is not generally controlled by the firm's compensation committee. Rather, managers themselves determine the level of their stock holdings....

Approximately half of credit card holders in the United States regularly carry unpaid credit card debt. These so-called "revolvers" exhibit payment behavior that differs from that of those who repay their entire credit card balance every month. Previous literature has focused on the adoption of...

As Chari et al (2008) point out in a recent paper, aggregate trends are very hard to interpret. They examine four common claims about the impact of financial sector phenomena on the economy and conclude that all four claims are myths. We argue that to evaluate these popular claims, one needs to...

This paper will discuss a proposed method for the estimation of loss distribution using information from a combination of internally derived data and data from external sources. The relevant context for this analysis is the estimation of operational loss distributions used in the calculation of...

Using a unique dataset composed of female employees at a large medical organization, this paper explores the role of social interactions among female co-workers and neighbors in the decision to obtain breast cancer screening exams. In our theoretical framework, the experience of other women is...

The reintroduction of capital punishment after the end of the Supreme Court moratorium has permitted researchers to employ state level heterogeneity in the use of capital punishment to study deterrent effects. However, no scholarly consensus exists as to their magnitude. A key reason this has...

As empirical work in identifying social effects becomes more prevalent, researchers are beginning to struggle with identifying the composition of social interactions within any given reference group. In this paper, we present a simple econometric methodology for the separate identification of...

As the baby boom cohort nears retirement age, the question of how to provide necessary health care and personal services to a growing elderly population has become a looming policy problem. Beginning in 2020, the number of Americans over the age of 65 will surpass the number of primary providers...

This working paper was written for the New England Public Policy Center’s third annual conference: “The Dynamic between Municipal Revenue Sources and the State-Local Relationship in New England”. It relies on data from the U.S. Census to examine the dynamic between municipal revenues and...

In this paper we model U.S. labor supply and demand in considerable detail in order to capture the enormous heterogeneity of the labor force and its evolution over the next 25 years. We represent labor supplies for a large number of demographic groups as responses to prices of leisure and...