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Among Alfred E. “Fred” Kahn's many accomplishments, none is better remembered than his pivotal role in deregulation of the US airline industry. Kahn's commitment to marry core microeconomic principles with institutional analysis, willingness as Chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board to step outside the “regulation as usual box,” and appealing wit made him the face of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, one of the great microeconomic policy triumphs. Lessons drawn from Kahn's work and the airline deregulation experience remain instructive for current academic research and regulatory policy design across broad sectors of the economy.

Economists have long concerned themselves with environmental influences, such as neighborhood, peers and family on individuals' beliefs and behaviors. However, the impact of children on parents' behavior has been little studied. Parenting daughters, psychologists have shown, increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or peers, can influence adult behavior. I demonstrate that the propensity to vote liberally on reproductive rights is significantly increasing in a congress person's proportion of daughters. The result demonstrates not only the relevance of child to parent behavioral influence, but also the importance of personal ideology in a legislator's voting decisions as it is not explained away by voter preferences.

At the outbreak of World War I, the biggest gold outflow in a generation posed a doublebarreled threat to American finance: An internal drain of currency from the banking system and an external drain of gold to Europe. The Federal Reserve System, newly authorized by Congress on December 23, 1913, remained on the sidelines during the summer of 1914, a victim of political and administrative delays. The absence of an operational central bank encouraged Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo to improvise the modern principle of aiming an independent weapon at each policy target. He employed a form of capital controls to deal with the external threat, shutting the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for more than four months to prevent Europeans from selling their American securities and demanding gold in return. And he invoked the emergency currency provisions of the Aldrich-Vreeland Act to deal with the internal threat, allowing banks to issue national bank notes, an important form of currency in pre-Federal Reserve days, without the normal requirement that the currency be secured by U.S. goverment bonds.

Among the thirteen original colonies, Pennsylvania was most successful at issuing paper money with only minimal effects on prices --so much so that the colony's experience is sometimes seen as violating the classical quantity theory of money. Quantity theorists usually attribute this apparent anomaly to mismeasurement of the money stock. In contrast, I use data on money, prices, and real activity in Pennsylvania from 1723 to 1774 and for the United States as a whole from 1790 to 1850 (when the money stock is better measured) to show that the long-run behavior of money and prices is well explained by the quantity theory in both periods, despite the differences in institutional arrangements, once growth in monetized transactions is taken into account.

Emerging equity markets witness occasional surges in prices (frenzies) and cross-market price dispersion (herds), accompanied by abundant media coverage. An information market complementarity can explain these anomalies. Because information has high fixed costs, high volume makes it inexpensive. Low prices induce investors to buy information that others buy. Given two identical assets, investors learn about one; abundant information reduces its payoff risk and raises its price. Transitions between low-information/low-asset-price and high-information/high-asset-price equilibria resemble frenzies. Equity data and new panel data on news coverage support the model's predictions: Asset market movements generate news and news raises prices and price dispersion.