One of the most fundamental and ubiquitous problems in microeconomics and operations research is how to assign objects to agents based on their individual preferences. An assignment is called popular if there is no other assignment that is preferred by a majority of the agents. Popular assignments need not exist, but the minimax theorem implies the existence of a popular random assignment. In t...

This article argues that the relatively new field of personnel economics (PE) holds strong potential as a tool for studying public sector workforces. This subfield of labor economics is based on a strong foundation of microeconomics, which provides a robust theoretical foundation for studying workforce and organizational design issues. PE has evolved on this foundation to a strong practical emp...

Econometrics has become an integral part of training in modern economics and business. Together with microeconomics and macroeconomics, econometrics has been taught as one of the three core courses in most undergraduate and graduate economic programs in North America. In China, the importance of econometrics has been increasingly recognized and econometric tools and methods have been widely emp...

From Micro Data to Causality: Forty Years of Empirical Labor Economics This overview describes the development of methods for empirical research in the field of labor economics during the past four decades. This period is characterized by the use of micro data to answer policy relevant research question. Prominent in the literature is the search for exogenous variation in treatment assignment w...

We present a model for efficient and robust power control in the downlink of Wideband CDMA wireless systems. The model is based on microeconomics, and takes into account both the congestion, in terms of increased interference, that a mobile user imposes to other users, and the downlink resource constraint, which involves the total transmission power at the base station. We discuss the applicati...

∗Data for this research was generously provided by Millennium Research Group (www.mrg.net). Many thanks to Adam Brandenburger, Ali Yurukoglu, Allan Collard-Wexler, Ariel Pakes, Catherine de Fontenay, Gus Stuart, Hong Luo, John Asker, Lúıs Cabral, Melissa Schilling, Michael Katz, and seminar audiences at NYU Stern’s Management Student Brownbag, NYU Stern NASS, and NYU GSAS Microeconomics Student...

Classical economic models often place emphasis on the aggregate interactions of suppliers and consumers in a marketplace, and many assume market actors have easy access to shared, trustworthy information. While these models have been widely effective in describing economic phenomena, they neglect an inherent and important property of economies: that they are networks of independent firms, inter...

According to one common view, information security comes down to technical measures. Given better access control policy models, formal proofs of cryptographic protocols, approved firewalls, better ways of detecting intrusions and malicious code, and better tools for system evaluation and assurance, the problems can be solved. In this note, I put forward a contrary view: information insecurity i...

Recent research has revealed a wealth of information about the microeconomics of currency markets and thus the determination of exchange rates at short horizons. This information should help in designing exchange-rate models. This paper analyzes an existing model that was previously demonstrated to be consistent with most of the major puzzles that have emerged under floating rates. It shows tha...

In this series of lectures we introduce the Monge-Kantorovich problem of optimally transporting one distribution of mass onto another, where optimality is measured against a cost function c(x, y). Connections to geometry, inequalities, and partial differential equations will be discussed, focusing in particular on recent developments in the regularity theory for Monge-Ampère type equations. An ...