We use a network model of credit risk to measure market expectations of the potential spillovers from a sovereign default. Specifically, we develop an empirical model, based on the recent theoretical literature on contagion in financial networks, and estimate it with data on sovereign credit...

Most work on social interactions studies a single, composite effect of interactions within a group. Yet in the case of sexual initiation, there are two distinct social mechanisms - peer-group norms and partner availability with separate effects and different potential interventions. Here I...

In this paper we examine educational disparities in mortality and life expectancy among non-Hispanic blacks and whites in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite increased attention and substantial dollars directed to groups with low socioeconomic status, within race and gender groups, the educational gap...

In the stochastic frontier model, we extend the multivariate probability statements of Horrace (J Econom, 126:335-354, 2005) to calculate the conditional probability that a firm is any particular efficiency rank in the sample. From this, we construct the conditional expected efficiency rank for...

Parametric stochastic frontier models yield firm-level conditional distributions of inefficiency that are truncated normal. Given these distributions, how should one assess and rank firm-level efficiency? This study compares the techniques of estimating (a) the conditional mean of inefficiency...

How is the economic status of the elderly changing and what are their prospects for the future? My portrait tells us how well off they are on average, but also about the vast disparities that exist among them. This description includes an often neglected measure of their economic well-being--the...

Perhaps the single greatest achievement of social policy in the United States over the last three decades has been reducing poverty in old age. The transition from work to retirement is no longer economically perilous for the vast majority of older American workers. For most married couples, the...

In June 2003 the New York State Court of Appeals altered the education-finance landscape with its ruling in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. New York. This ruling called for “[r]eforms to the current system of financing school funding” designed to ensure “that every school in New York City...

One is always hesitant to speak about the future. A famous philosopher from New York, Yogi Berra, said "Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future," and I have some trepidation about doing so now. There is also the difficulty of understanding what really has happened in the...