This paper provides a framework for analyzing optimal government transfers of education when individuals are tempted to underinvest in education. The government may devise a transfer using a combination of free compulsory education, vouchers and price subsidies. I show that government...

This paper addresses whether there are productivity differences between men and women among blue-collar workers. We compare the wages under piece- and time-rate contracts of men and women working in the same occupation in the same establishment in three countries: the U.S., Norway, and Sweden....

Research with Keynesian-style models has emphasized the importance of the output gap for policies aimed at controlling inflation while declaring monetary aggregates largely irrelevant. Critics, however, have argued that these models need to be modifed to account for observed money growth and...

The Social Security system contains many features designed to provide an adequate retirement income for familes, rather than just individual retired workers. The most important of these features is the spousal benefit, under which secondary earners are entitled to receive a monthly payment of 50...

This paper studies the identification and estimation of a basic model of technology adoption using specifcally collected information on subjective beliefs and expectations to identify key model parameters. We discuss identifcation with both non-parametrically and parametrically specified utility...

For three years after the typical developing country opens its stock market to inflows of foreign capital, the average annual growth rate of the real wage in the manufacturing sector increases by a factor of seven. No such increase occurs in a control group of developing countries. The temporary...

Several important auction settings, including treasury auctions in Canada and the U.S., have the feature that some bidders (dealers) observe the bids of a subset of other bidders (customers). Quantifying the economic advantage that informationally advantaged bidders derive from this...

We report results from a validation study of Nielsen Homescan data. We use data from a large grocery chain to match thousands of individual transactions that were recorded by both the retailer (at the store) and the Nielsen Homescan panelist (athome). First, we report how often shopping trips...

Research in the early 1980s found that the gains from international coordination of monetary policy were quantitatively small compared to simply getting domestic policy right. That prediction turned out to be a pretty good description of monetary policy in the 1980s, 1990s, and until recently....

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen...