Salaries in public education are the largest single expenditure of state and local governments. In the absence of absolute standards for evaluating policy, both politicians and interest groups are likely to turn to relative performance measures. These judgments often involve comparisons of...

We develop an explanation of the emergence of local norms, and theassociated phenomenon of geographical variation in behavior.Individuals are assumed to interact locally with neighbors in anenvironment with a network externality. Although many patterns ofbehavior are possible, the dispersed...

Location-specific norms of behavior are a widespread phenomenon. In the case of medical practice, numerous studies have found that geographic location exerts a strong influence on the choice of treatments and procedures. This paper shows how the presence of social influence on treatment...

Burke, Fournier, and Prasad (2007) present evidence of star effects in the adoption and utilization of stents following their introduction in the mid-1990s. Here, we experiment with alternative constructions of star status and with additional control variables in the analysis and find further...

While the US airline industry has been substantially transformed in recent years by the growth of low-cost airlines, the cost-saving benefits of lower airfares are difficult to gauge empirically. There are two important ways in which this paper contributes to the existing literature on the...