We analyze voluntary private contributions to public goods and the role seed money plays in signaling the public good's quality to potential subsequent contributors. We present a theoretical model and analyze two sets of naturally occurring data from crowd-funding platforms. After developing the...

This paper begins with an examination of various ways of measuring unemployment and, borrowing ideas from the poverty measurement literature, proposes four new general unemployment indices. The first of these is parallel to the Sen poverty index; the second, to the Sen index's generalization by...