A great deal of attention has been paid in the literature to estimating the impacts of training programs. Much less attention has been devoted to how training agencies assign participants to training programs, and to how these allocation decisions vary with agency resources, the initial skill...

In this paper, we study the stationary and non-stationary equilibria of a de- terministic, pure exchange, two-period overlapping generations model with habit persistence. We show that preferences with multiplicative habits can lead to quite different equilibrium outcomes compared to subtractive...

This study examines the potential causal effect of parental divorce on child educational attainments, using annual data on individuals covering the entire time span between birth until the completion of ones schooling drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). A joint hazard model of...

This paper develops a model of political contributions in which a politician can either sell policy favors, or sell access. Access allows interest groups to share hard information with the politician in support of their preferred policy. Here selling access maximizes policy utility, while...

There is a debate on whether executive pay reflects rent extraction due to “managerial power” or is the result of arms-length bargaining in a principal-agent framework. In this paper we offer a test of the managerial power hypothesis by empirically examining the CEO compensation of U.S....

This paper studies first–order differentiability properties of the value function in concave dynamic programs. Motivated by economic considerations, we dispense with commonly imposed interiority assumptions. We suppose that the correspondence of feasible choices varies with the vector of state...

An important goal in the analysis of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome is to understand the mechanisms through which the treatment causally works. In the economics literature, however, there seems to be no available framework to estimate the relative importance of different causal...

Using a representative sample of children all born to unwed parents drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), we investigate whether marriage after childbirth has a causal effect on early child cognitive ability, using a treatment outcome approach to account for...

A bidder may increase his bid over the course of an auction when (1) he becomes more certain about his private valuation over time (as he has more time to consider using the item), and (2) there is a positive probability he is unable to return to the auction to submit a bid in a later period....

We investigate the effect of speaking Spanish at home as a child on completed schooling and aptitude test scores using data on Hispanics who grew up in the U.S. from the NLSY79. We model the accumulation of traditional human capital and English fluency, leading to the joint determination of...