This paper revisits the college admissions problem and studies the efficiency, incentive, and monotonicity for colleges. We show that max-min criterion that is stronger than substitutability, together with the quota-saturability that requires having enough acceptable applicants, guarantees weak Pareto efficiency and strategy-proofness for colleges under the colleges-proposing deferred acceptanc...

BACKGROUND Genetic factors influencing lung function may predispose to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The fibroblast growth factor 10 (FGF10) signalling pathway is critical for lung development and lung epithelial renewal. The hypothesis behind this study was that constitutive FGF10 insufficiency may lead to pulmonary disorder. Therefore investigation of the pulmonary functions o...

CATI has been widely used in Italian surveys since the 1980s. As a matter of fact telephone interviewing, compared to traditional face-to-face data collection methods, allows to save time and money. It also offers further advantages: better control over the quality of the interview through a centralized facility, continuous monitoring and supervision, and the opportunity to include experiment-l...

Suppose an urn contains n sets of beads, each set of size k. Beads are drawn from the urn one at a time without replacement. We derive a closed-form expression for the expected number of draws required to completely remove the first k-set, the second, the third, etc. We accomplish this by recasting the problem as a special kind of random walk through the integer points in [0, k]n and exploiting...

Do affirmative action measures for women in politics change the way constituents view and interact with their female representatives? A subnational randomized policy experiment in Lesotho with single-member districts reserved for female community councilors provides causal evidence to this question. Using survey data, I find that having a quota-mandated female representative either has no effec...

Quota restrictions on United States imports of apparel and textiles under the multifiber arrangement (MFA) ended abruptly in January 2005. This change in policy was large, predetermined, and fully anticipated, making it an ideal natural experiment for testing the theory of trade policy. Prices of quota-constrained categories from China fell by 38% in 2005, with smaller declines from other expor...

We compare taxes and quotas where a regulator and a non-strategic firm have asymmetric information about a pollution-producing activity. In previous studies, optimal quotas are generally assumed to bind with probability one. We analyze the conditions under which a quota that binds with probability less than one is optimal. A quota that may be slack can be targeted towards some firms whilst allo...

In this paper we compare and contrast the political viability of bilateral Free Trade Area (FTA) Agreements in the presence of tariffs and quotas. Assuming that the government maximizes a weighted sum of welfare and producer profits, we show that the political viability of FTAs varies according to whether trade restrictions take the form of tariffs or quotas. A key result is that whereas an FTA...