Typical censoring models have mass points at the upper or lower tails, both of an otherwise continuous outcome distribution. In contrast, we consider a model with point in interior We refer to this as “bunching” and use it estimate parameters. For example, economic theory suggests that, for increasing marginal income tax rates, many taxpayers will report exactly threshold where rate increases. ...

In a seminal paper, Camerer, Babcock, Loewenstein, and Thaler (1997) find that the wage elasticity of daily hours of work New York City (NYC) taxi drivers is negative and conclude that their labor supply behavior is consistent with target earning (having reference dependent preferences). I replicate and extend the CBLT analysis using data from all trips taken in all taxi cabs in NYC for the fiv...

T what extent do firms engage in product line actions simultaneously with actions in other marketing variables? What are the determinants of product line actions? To what extent are product line actions proactive? To what degree are they reactive? How can a firm's product line action elasticity (percent change in product line length with respect to percent change in competitor's past and antici...

We assess the Neumark, Salas and Wascher (NSW) critique of our minimum wage findings. Recent studies, including one by NSW, obtain small employment elasticities for restaurants, -0.06 or less in magnitude. The substantive critique in NSW thus centers primarily upon teens. Using a longer (19792014) sample than used by NSW and in our own previous work, we find clear evidence that teen minimum wag...

Recent literature on tobacco taxation suggests that optimal tax rates should be very high. But such high taxes raise concerns over regressivity. Most econometric estimates of elasticities by income group use historic price data that are low, and the usefulness of such estimates is therefore questionable on account of the serious 'out of sample' prediction problem. To address that problem, this ...

In 2011, Switzerland announced a floor for the Swiss franc, and it immediately depreciated by 10 percent. Many argue that depreciations should not matter for Switzerland’s export basket because luxury brands and high value added products predominate, and these should compete on quality rather than price. We measure the sophistication of Swiss exports using Hausmann et al.’s (2007) and Kwan’s (2...

In this paper, we estimate own-price elasticities for fixed network voice telephony access and national calls services for private users as well as cross-price elasticities to mobile services using time series data from 2002-2007 from the Austrian market. Using instrumental variable estimates and considering cointegration, we find that access is inelastic while calls are elastic. We conclude th...