This report describes an easily computable model of the relation between cigarette prices and cigarette consumption in the United States. The model is used to predict the revenue impacts of Federal excise tax hikes ranging from $0.45 to $1.76 per pack.

I model the labor supply of taxi drivers as the result of optimization based on an inter-temporal utility function. Since income effects in response to temporary fluctuations in daily earnings opportunities are likely to be small, cumulative hours will be much more important than cumulative...

This paper discusses some recent advances in the area of culture and economics and examines the effect of culture on a key economic outcome: female labor supply. To separate the effect of market variables and institutions from culture, I use an epidemiological approach, studying...

This paper is an attempt to examine some of the microeconomic foundations of this last view of the link between current accounts and exchange rata. Several authors, especially Kouri and de Macedo (1978), but also more recently Dornbusch (1980), have sought to justify the portfolio approach in...

Why do sovereign states sometimes fail to settle territorial disputes peacefully? Also, why do even peaceful settlements of territorial disputes rarely call for the resulting border to be unfortified? This paper explores a class of answers to these questions that is based on the following...

This paper presents a signaling explanation for unemployment. The basic idea is that employment at an unskilled job may be regarded as a bad signal. Therefore, good workers who are more likely to qualify for employment at a skilled job in the future are better off being unemployed than accepting...

I employ data drawn from the Retirement History Survey to study the accuracy of pre-retirement expectations concerning social security benefits. The major findings of this study are as follows. First, survey responses to questions about expected benefits are reasonably noisy. However, when one...

This paper discusses some of the attempts economists have made in the last ten years or so to integrate norms into the theory of the firm. The paper argues that (a) although norms are undoubtedly very important both inside and between firms, incorporating them into the theory has been very...

This paper studies a model where money is valued for the liquidity services it provides in the future. These liquidity services cannot be provided by any other asset. Changes in expectations of the value of future liquidity services affect the desired proportions of money and other assets in...

For political and practical reasons, environmental regulations sometimes treat point source polluters, such as power plants, differently from mobile source polluters, such as vehicles. This paper measures the extent of this regulatory asymmetry in the case of nitrogen oxides (NOx), the criteria...