Product design involves choosing from a vast array of components and subcomponents. By developing modular platforms and communicating with multiple suppliers each product becomes a bundle of attributes. The multitude of potential product configurations poses a challenge in identifying optimal configurations to offer customers. For most companies, the greatest challenge is measuring consumers’ m...

I develop a matching model with heterogeneous workers, firms, and worker-firm matches, and apply it to longitudinal linked data on employers and employees. Workers vary in their marginal product when employed. Firms vary in their marginal product and cost of maintaining a vacancy. The marginal product of a worker-firm match also depends on a match-specific interaction between worker and firm th...

In this paper, we study optimal tax policy in a dynamic private information economy. We describe efficient allocations and competitive equilibria. The standard assumption in the literature is that trades are observable by all agents. We show that in such an environment the competitive equilibrium is efficient and that government consumption can be financed by lump-sum taxation. We go on to cons...

Divisia index A method of aggregation used in economics that permits variable substitution among material types without imposing a priori restrictions on the degree of substitution. emergy The quantity of solar energy used directly and indirectly to produce a natural resource, good, or service. energy quality The relative economic usefulness per heat equivalent unit of different fuels and elect...

Approximately 100,000 youths are currently incarcerated in the US, yet little is known whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior. This paper uses the incarceration tendency of randomly-assigned judges as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects of juvenile incarceration on adult r...

Theorem 2 establishes that if the marginal cost of one of the components of product 2 increases, the equilibrium prices of every product rise. It is tempting to assume that this must be good news for the makers of components of the other products. For products with just one component, this is indeed the case. For example, if n1 = 1, the lone firm in T1 sees the price of every competing product ...

In this paper, dynamic aspects of railway infrastructure operation and maintenance costs in Sweden are explored. Econometric cost functions are estimated to check the robustness of previous marginal cost estimates by introducing lags and leads of both dependent and independent variables. We find support for a forward-looking behaviour within the Swedish National Rail Administration (Banverket) ...

Suppose we have data from a bivariate model with parametric marginals. Efficient estimators of the parameters in the marginal models are generally not efficient in the bivariate model. In this article, we propose a method of improving these marginal estimators and demonstrate that the magnitude of this improvement can be as large as 100 percent in some cases.

background. this study evaluated the effect of two prophylaxis techniques on the marginal gap of ci v resin-modified glass-ionomer restorations. methods. standard cl v cavities were prepared on the buccal surfaces of 48 sound bovine mandibular incisors in this in vitro study. after restoration of the cavities with gc fuji ii lc resin-modified glass-ionomer, the samples were randomly assigned to...

Approximately 100,000 youths are currently incarcerated in the US, yet little is known whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior. This paper uses the incarceration tendency of randomly-assigned judges as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects of juvenile incarceration on adult r...