We take U.S. and Israeli household data on expenditures of time and goods, generate an exhaustive set of commodities that households produce/consume using them, and calculate their relative goods intensities. Leisure activities are uniformly relatively time intensive, health, travel and lodging...

Food Stamps represent nearly $11 billion of personal income in the United States. The coupons that are issued to represent the purchasing power available to recipients are also reserves for the commercial banking system.This study asks how closely these coupons are substitutable for what is...

Economic theories of discrimination are usually based on tastes. The huge body of empirical studies, however, considers the discriminatory outcomes that are the reduced-form results of interactions between tastes and opportunity sets. None examines tastes for discrimination directly, or...

Firms' beliefs that they may be unable to sell as much as they would like at the market price leads not only to a quantity spillover (even when prices are flexible) but also to a spillover of product demand elasticity onto the elasticity of labor demand. Hence, optimal firm behavior can be...

Product diversity pervades every modern marketplace, and economists have devoted substantial attention to firms' decisions about the supply of variety. This study looks at the consumer's side by discussing the demand for variety. Using the framework of the home-production model, we trace...

Markets that involve customers waiting for services or goods in queues whose length they cannot observe are studied. In these markets suppliers truncate queues that become so long that they jeopardize the supplier's future relations with the customer. The length of the queue and the probability...

This study uses data for the U.S. from the May 1991 CPS and for Germany from the 1990 wave of the Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) to analyze when people work during the day and week. The evidence shows: 1) Work in the evenings or at night is quite common in both countries, with around 7 percent of...

Measuring market discrimination is extremely difficult except in the increasingly rare case where physical output measures allow direct measurement of productivity. We illustrate this point with evidence on elections to offices of the American Economic Association. Using a new technique to infer...

The effects on consumption and retirement of characteristics of the life cycle, especially the length of the horizon, are examined. At any given age people will work more and consume less if they expect to live longer. This and other propositions are tested on several sets of data. The Terman...

Sleep must be considered subject to choice and affected by the same economic variables that affect other uses of time. Using aggregated data for 12 countries, a cross-section of microeconomic data, and a panel of households, we demonstrate that increases in time spent in the labor market reduce...