We add quality uncertainty to a two-country trade model with CES preference and monopolistic competition. There are two kinds of firms - low quality and high quality. Quality is perfectly observable in the domestic market but not in the foreign market. Exporters use price to signal their...

Uncertainty about product quality is endemic in international trade. We develop a dynamic, two country model where home producers differ in terms of the quality of the products they sell. This quality is imperfectly observed by foreign consumers initially but known once the product is consumed....

We empirically quantify and characterize informational barriers to entry into the anti-ulcer drug market by studying the diffusion process of the molecule Omeprazole in the first 30 months after it entered the market. Using a novel panel dataset tracking doctors' complete prescription histories,...

The Anti-Red Shift -- to the Dark Side: Changes in the Colour Patterns and Market Values of Flemish Luxury Woollens, 1300 - 1550 This study documents, though it cannot fully explain, the striking shift in the spectrum of colour patterns in woollen textiles, from those of the Black Death era in...

If mankind’s three basic necessities have always been food, clothing, and shelter, whose production, trade, and consumption have rightly been a primary focus of economists and economic historians for many generations, we may ask this vital question: how do they distinguish between necessities...

I empirically examines the anticompetitive effects of land use regulation by using microdata on midscale chain hotels in Texas. I construct a dynamic entry-exit model of midscale hotel chains. By endogenizing their entry decisions, the model explicitly considers hotel chains' reactions to the...

I study a budget-constrained, private-valuation, sealed-bid sequential auction with two incompletely-informed, risk-neutral bidders in which the valuations and income may be non-monotonic functions of a bidder's type. Multiple equilibrium symmetric bidding functions may exist that differ in...

Between 1940 and 2000 there has been a substantial increase of educational attainment in the United States. What caused this trend? We develop a model of human capital accumulation that features a non-degenerate distribution of educational attainment in the population. We use this framework to...

Although technical change is central in much of modern economics, traditional measures of it are, for a number of reasons, flawed. We discuss in this paper new indicators based on data drawn from the MARC records of the Library of Congress on the number of new technology titles in various fields...