We investigate the effect of new facilities on attendance in professional baseball, basketball, and football from 1969 to 2001. We find a strong, persistent effect in baseball and basketball, and little effect in football. Size and duration estimates imply that baseball teams sell 2,500,794 additional tickets over the first eight seasons, basketball teams 293,878 over the first nine seasons, an...

This paper extends the concept of the PLR-group from the neo-Riemannian theory, which acts on the set of major and minor triads, to a PS-group, which acts on the set of major and minor seventh chords. Like the PLR-group, the PS-group is isomorphic to D12, the dihedral group of order 24, and only compositions of two operations are needed to generate all group elements. Unlike the actions from PL...

Is financial literacy a substitute or complement for financial advice? We analyze the decision by consumers to seek financial advice in the form of credit counseling. Credit counseling is an important component of the consumer credit sector for consumers facing debt problems. Our analysis accounts for the endogeneity of an individual’s financial situation to financial literacy, and the endogene...

Fifty years on we examine two key propositions in Neale’s (1964) “Peculiar Economics”: the need for competitors in sport to have opponents of similar ability in order to earn large revenues and the effect of frequent changes sports leagues’ standings on consumer demand. We develop a consumer choice model under uncertainty, and a structural econometric model, to motivate and test these ideas. Un...

Short-Run and Long-Term Effects of Childbirth on Mothers’ Employment and Working Hours Across Institutional Regimes: An Empirical Analysis Based on the European Community Household Panel The employment behavior of mothers is strongly influenced by labor market regulations and certain institutional arrangements, which both vary greatly across European countries. Using the European Community Hous...

Examining two different changes in retail format, we show that consumers alter their purchase behavior when the retail context changes. In both settings, the change in purchasing behavior is consistent with the effect being driven by an interpersonal interaction between the consumer and the retail clerk. We therefore model the change in format as a “social friction” in which consumers may not p...

We run a large field experiment with an online company specializing in selling used automobiles via ascending auctions. We manipulate experimentally the “price grid,” or the possible amounts that bidders can bid above the current standing price. Using two diverse auction sites, one in New York and one in Texas, we find that buyer and seller behavior differs strikingly across the two sites. Spec...

If preferences or budgets are heterogeneous across people (as they clearly are), then individual costof-living indices are also heterogeneous. Thus, any social cost-of-living index faces an aggregation problem. In this paper, we provide a solution to this problem which we call a ’common-scaling’social cost-of-living index (CS-SCOLI). In addition, we describe nonparametric methods for estimating...

To date, the valuation of environmental quality has been severely hampered by our ability to actually measure quality. Often environmental resources are described by exhaustive lists of attributes. Unfortunately, high multicollinearity among attributes leads to serious econometric problems. The use of too few attributes, on the other hand, leads to underspecification of the valuation model. Fin...

We use responses to survey questions in the 2010 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth that ask consumers how much of an unexpected transitory income change they would consume. The marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is 48 percent on average. We also find substantial heterogeneity in the distribution, as households with low cash-on-hand exhibit a much higher MPC than affluent household...