Hollywood films are generally released first in the United States and then later abroad, with some variation in lags across films and countries. With the growth in movie piracy since the appearance of BitTorrent in 2003, films have become available through illegal piracy immediately after...

Digitization has led to product proliferation, straining traditional institutions for product discovery; but digitization has also spawned crowd-based rating systems. We compare the relative impacts of professional critics and crowd-based Amazon star ratings on consumer welfare in book...

A necessary condition for justifying a policy such as publicly provided or subsidized low-income housing is that it has a real effect on recipients' outcomes. In this paper, we examine one aspect of the real effect of public or subsidized housing -- does it increase the housing stock? If...

Political outcomes are well understood to depend on the spatial distribution of citizen preferences. In this paper, we document that the same holds for the individual decision to be politically active. Using both cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence on turnout, we show that citizens are...

Markets are generally thought to avoid problems, such as tyranny of the majority, that arise when allocation is accomplished through collective processes. Yet, with fixed costs, differentiated product markets deliver only products desired by substantial constituencies. When consumers share...

Free entry into markets with decreasing average costs and differentiated products can result in an inefficient number of firms and suboptimal product variety. Because new firms and products draw their customers in part from existing products, concentration can affect incentives to enter as well...

The world's population is living longer but retiring earlier, and vast numbers of adults now spend as much as 1/3 of their lifetimes relying on public and private retirement benefits. Consequently, labor economists are interested in the forces driving retirement behavior, seeking to understand...

When judges have discretion over fines and prison terms, sentencing exhibits a tendency" toward efficiency: fines are larger, and prison terms shorter, for offenders with greater ability to" pay. Sentencing guidelines place fairly rigid upper and lower limits on fines and prison terms" and may...

Radio signals are pure public goods whose total value to society is the sum of their value to advertisers and listeners. Because broadcasters can capture only part of the value of their product as revenue, there is the potential for a classic problem of underprovision. Small markets have much...

In theory, free entry can lead to social inefficiency. When new products are substitutes for existing products, the business stolen from incumbents places a wedge between private and social benefits of entry. The business stealing effect can be offset if entry reduces prices or increases...