This paper estimates the degree of stickiness in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a stickiness parameter of about 0.7 on average across countries. The sticky consumption growth model outperforms the random walk model of Hall (1978) and typically fits the data better than the popular Mankiw (1989) model, though in a few countries, the sticky consumption growth and Campbell-Mankiw models work about equally well.

U.S. federal law calls for an end to overfishing, but measuring overfishing requires knowledge of bioeconomic parameters. Using microlevel economic data from the commercial fishery, this paper proposes a two-stage approach to estimate these parameters for a generalized fishery model. In the first stage, a fishery production function is consistently estimated by a within-period estimator treating the latent stock as a fixed effect. The estimated stock is then substituted into an equation of fish stock dynamics to estimate all other biological parameters. The bootstrap approach is used to correct the standard errors in the two-stage model. This method is applied to the reef-fish fishery in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. The traditional method, which uses catch-per-unit-effort as a stock proxy, significantly overstates the optimal harvest level.

Despite their ubiquity, observational studies to infer the causal effect of a so-called immutable characteristic, such as race or sex, have struggled for coherence, given the unavailability of a manipulation analogous to a “treatment” in a randomized experiment and the danger of posttreatment bias. We demonstrate that a shift in focus from actual traits to perceptions of them can address both of these issues while facilitating articulation of other critical concepts, particularly the timing of treatment assignment. We illustrate concepts by discussing the designs of various studies of the role of race in trial court death penalty decisions.

Using 1980–2000 Census data to study the impact of source country characteristics on married adult immigrants' labor supply assimilation profiles, we find that immigrant women from countries with high female labor supply persistently work more than those from low-female-supply countries. While both groups of women work less than comparable natives on arrival, women from high-female-participation countries eventually close the gap with natives entirely, and women from low-female-labor supply countries eliminate most of it. Men's labor supply is unaffected by source country female participation, suggesting that the findings on women reflect notions of gender roles.