Review

Congestion at airports imposes large costs on airlines and their passengers. A key reason for congestion is that an airline schedules its flights without regard to the costs imposed on other airlines and their passengers. As a result, during some time intervals, airlines schedule more flights to and from an airport than that airport can accommodate and flights are delayed.

Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, the U.S. commercial paper market has grown to become a key source of short-term funding for major businesses, with issuance averaging over $100 billion per day. In the fall of 2008, the commercial paper market achieved national prominence when increasing market stress caused some to fear that, given its size and importance, the market’s failure would sharply worsen the recession.

In standard economic theory, labor supply decisions depend on the complete set of prices: wages and the prices of relevant consumption goods. Nonetheless, most theoretical and empirical work in labor supply studies ignore prices other than wages. The authors address the question of whether the common practice of ignoring local price variation in labor supply studies is as innocuous as generally assumed.

The extreme volatility of stock market values has been the subject of a large body of literature. Previous research focused on the short run because of a widespread belief that in the long run the market reverts to well-established fundamentals. The authors' research suggests this belief should be questioned.