Nonprofit organizations rely on donations from large competitive marketplaces to provide key social service goods. Most research focuses on competition in output markets without considering philanthropic markets where nonprofits make decisions about how much effort to put into fundraising. We develop and estimate a model that highlights the strategic nature of fundraising, showing that rival NP’s fundraising responses can be strategic complements or substitutes. We find evidence of strategic substitutes. NPs demonstrate nontrivial strategic responses to rival’s fundraising and, in totality, the across sector impacts are important to consider. Counterfactual exercises show that reducing competition decreases equilibrium fundraising levels.

We build on the intuitive (static) modeling framework of Rosen (1974) and specify a simple, forward-looking model of location choice. We use this model, along with a series of graphs, to describe the potential biases associated with the static model and relate these biases to the time series of the amenity of interest. We then derive an adjustment factor that allows the potentially biased static estimates to be converted into forwardlooking estimates. Finally, we illustrate these concepts with two empirical applications: the marginal willingness to pay to avoid violent crime and the marginal willingness to pay to avoid air pollution.

We explore how examiner behavior is altered by the time allocated for reviewing patent applications. Insufficient examination time may hamper examiner search and rejection efforts, leaving examiners more inclined to grant invalid applications. To test this prediction, we use application-level data to trace the behavior of individual examiners over the course of a series of promotions that carry with them reductions in examination time allocations. We find evidence demonstrating that such promotions are associated with reductions in examination scrutiny and increases in granting tendencies, as well as evidence that those additional patents being issued on the margin are of below-average quality.

It is often asserted that a flexible exchange rate regime would facilitate current account adjustment. Using data on over 170 countries over the 1971–2005 period, we examine this assertion systematically. We find no strong, robust, or monotonic relationship between exchange rate regime flexibility and the rate of current account reversion, even after accounting for the degree of economic development and trade and capital account openness. This finding presents a challenge to the Friedman (1953) hypothesis and a popular policy recommendation by international financial institutions.

We find new empirical regularities in the business cycle in a cross-country panel of 22 OECD countries for the period 1972 to 2007; entrepreneurship Granger-causes the cycles of the world economy. Furthermore, the entrepreneurial cycle is positively affected by the national unemployment cycle. We discuss possible causes and implications of these findings.

We exploit variation in gasoline and cigarettes taxes in adjacent political jurisdictions for northern Illinois and Indiana to examine consumers' trade-off between prices and travel. We develop a model that relates activity in the retail gasoline industry around the tax borders to consumer locations. Our results indicate that the willingness of a typical Chicagoland consumer to travel an additional mile to buy gasoline corresponds to about $0.065 to $0.084 per gallon. According to our estimates, the observed area of Chicago, the jurisdiction with the highest taxes, is missing approximately 40% of the capacity that would exist were taxes equalized.

In previous research, a substantial gap in test scores between white and black students persists, even after controlling for a wide range of observable characteristics. Using a newly available data set (the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study), we demonstrate that in stark contrast to earlier studies, the black-white test score gap among incoming kindergartners disappears when we control for a small number of covariates. Real gains by black children in recent cohorts appear to play an important role in explaining the differences between our findings and earlier research. The availability of better covariates also contributes. Over the first two years of school, however, blacks lose substantial ground relative to other races. There is suggestive evidence that differences in school quality may be an important part of the explanation. None of the other hypotheses we test to explain why blacks are losing ground receive any empirical backing.

Despite intensive scrutiny, the effects of Medicaid expansions on the health insurance status of low-income children remain controversial. We reexamine the effects of the two largest federally mandated expansions which offered Medicaid coverage to low-income children in specific age ranges and birth cohorts. We use a regression discontinuity approach, comparing Medicaid enrollment, private insurance coverage, and overall insurance coverage on either side of the age limits of the laws. We conclude that the modest impacts of the expansions on health insurance coverage arose because of very low takeup rates of the newly available coverage, rather than from crowdout of private insurance coverage.