Mortality and Immortality It has been known for centuries that the rich and famous have longer lives than the poor and ordinary. Causality, however, remains trenchantly debated. The ideal experiment would be one in which status and money could somehow be dropped upon a sub-sample of individuals while those in a control group received neither. This paper attempts to formulate a test in that spir...

Immigration and the Neighborhood What impact does immigration have on neighborhood dynamics? Within metropolitan areas, we find that housing values have grown relatively more slowly in neighborhoods of immigrant settlement. We propose three nonexclusive explanations: changes in housing quality, reverse causality, or the hypothesis that natives find immigrant neighbors relatively less attractive...

This paper analyzes the productivity performance of Chinese manufacturing firms from 1995 to 2003 by using a large-scale firm-level dataset from the National Bureau of Statistics, Peoples Republic of China. Over this period, a large number of firms were converted to stock holding companies, and an increasing presence of foreign-owned companies further accelerated structural changes in Chinese i...

The present paper thoroughly explores second-best efficient allocations in an adverse selection insurance economy. We start from a natural extension of the classical model, assuming less than perfect risk perceptions. We propose first and second welfare theorems, by means of which we describe efficiencyenhancing policies. Notions of weak and strong adverse selection are promising for interpreti...

We investigate the relationship between household debt and health outcomes for OECD countries over the period 1995 to 2012. Using a dataset of aggregated, standardized and objective measures of household debt and health outcomes, we estimate an instrumental variable (GMM) model in order to deal with endogeneity and reverse causality concerns between health and debt. We find that higher househol...

Self-Esteem and Earnings Recent research in economics suggests a positive association between self-esteem and earnings. A major problem in this literature is that from simple cross-sectional wage regressions it is not possible to conclude that self-esteem has a causal impact on earnings. While classical measurement error leads to an attenuation bias, reverse causality and omitted variable are l...

In this paper, we use high-frequency data on five frequently traded stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the year 1999 to examine the price impact of trades and its relation to the trading intensity. We show that the distribution of the absolute price change with fast trading firstorder stochastically dominates the distribution of the absolute price change with slow trading. M...

Not the Opium of the People: Income and Secularization in a Panel of Prussian Counties The interplay between religion and the economy has occupied social scientists for long. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance for six waves of up to 175 Prussian counties spanning 1886-1911. The data reveal a marked decline in church attendance coinciding with increasing incom...

The theory of demand and supply implies a positive relationship, or ‘‘price transmission’’ between the prices of products at different stages of manufacturing. This relationship was investigated with quarterly prices of softwood stumpage in the US South, and national prices of forest products, from 1977 to 2002. All prices, net of inflation, were found to be nonstationary and there was no evide...

We empirically investigate the degree of integration that existed prior to the cost increases that caused emergency conditions in the Western Systems Coordinating Council (WSCC), particularly California, during the summer of 2000. Evidence from Granger causality tests and common features analysis over the period from December 1994 to September 1999 indicates a moderate degree of integration amo...