Koleman S. Strumpf’s research while affiliated with Wake Forest University and other places

We study the geographic distribution of military supply contracts during World War II. This is a unique case, where $3 trillion current day dollars was spent. We find robust evidence consistent with the hypothesis that economic factors dominated the allocation of supply contracts, and that political factors—or at least winning the 1944 presidential election—were at best of secondary importance. General industrial capacity in 1939, as well as specialized industrial capacity for aircraft production, are strong predictors of contract spending across states. Electoral college pivot probabilities are weak predictors of contract (and new facilities) spending, and under the most plausible assumptions they are essentially unrelated to spending. This is true over the entire period 1940–1944, and also for shorter periods leading up to the election in November 1944. That is, we find no evidence of an electoral cycle in the distribution of funds.

Many public health policies are rooted in findings from medical and epidemiological studies that fail to consider behavioral influences. Using nearly 50 years of data from Framingham Heart Study male participants, we evaluate the longevity consequences of different lifetime smoking patterns by jointly estimating smoking behavior and health outcomes over the life cycle, by richly including smoking and health histories, and by flexibly incorporating correlated unobserved heterogeneity. Unconditional difference‐in‐mean calculations that treat smoking behaviors as random indicate a 9.3 year difference in age of death between lifelong smokers and nonsmokers; our findings suggest the bias‐corrected difference is 4.3 years. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

Even as we approach the twentieth anniversary of widespread file sharing, its impact on the sale of copyrighted material remains in dispute. We contributed to this debate with an early study, “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” that was published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2007. Perhaps surprisingly, we found that piracy contributed to the decline in music sales but was not the main cause. In this article, we review and respond to recent criticism of our work by Stan Liebowitz in Econ Journal Watch. We show how the use of proxies for file sharing can result in misleading conclusions. We close by reviewing what we know about the impact of file sharing on record sales today. In our view, new music formats are an important if understudied channel through which changes in technology influence the demand for entertainment.

No abstract available.

The advent of file sharing has considerably weakened effective copyright protection. Today, more than 60% of Internet traffic consists of consumers sharing music, movies, books, and games. Yet, despite the popularity of the new technology, file sharing has not undermined the incentives of authors to produce new works. We argue that the effect of file sharing has been muted for three reasons. (1) The cannibalization of sales that is due to file sharing is more modest than many observers assume. Empirical work suggests that in music, no more than 20% of the recent decline in sales is due to sharing. (2) File sharing increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices. The sale of more expensive complements has added to artists’ incomes. (3) In many creative industries, monetary incentives play a reduced role in motivating authors to remain creative. Data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers. Since the advent of file sharing, the production of music, books, and movies has increased sharply.

Political future markets, in which investors bet on election outcomes, are often thought a recent invention. Such markets in fact have a long history in many Western countries. This paper traces the operation of political futures markets back to 16th Century Italy, 18th Century Britain, and 19th Century United States. In the United States, election betting was a common part of political campaigns in the antebellum period, but became increasingly concentrated in the organized futures markets in New York City over the postbellum period.

We develop a demand model for goods that are subject to habit formation. We show that consumption plans of forward-looking individuals depend on preferences, current period prices, and individual beliefs about the evolution of future prices. Moreover, an increase in price uncertainty reduces consumption along the optimal path. With smoking as our application, we test the predictions of our model using a unique data set of prices for cigarettes and the restricted-use version of the National Education Longitudinal Study. Our estimation results suggest that teenagers who live in metropolitan areas with a large amount of cigarette price volatility have, on average, significantly lower levels of cigarette consumption. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For industries ranging from software to pharmaceuticals and entertainment, there is an intense debate about the appropriate level of protection for intellectual property. The Internet provides a natural crucible to assess the implications of reduced protection because it drastically lowers the cost of copying information. In this paper, we analyze whether file sharing has reduced the legal sales of music. While this question is receiving considerable attention in academia, industry, and Congress, we are the first to study the phenomenon employing data on actual downloads of music files. We match an extensive sample of downloads to U. S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, we instrument for downloads using data on international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Our estimates are inconsistent

Individual smoking behavior persists over time, but is this repeated behavior attributed to past use or individual heterogeneity? Using longitudinal data on teens from all 50 United States from 1988 to 1992, we find a significant causal role for endogenous past cigarette consumption even after controlling extensively for observed and unobserved heterogeneity. We also find measurable evidence of different sensitivities to cigarette price depending on past use. These two findings suggest that a cigarette price increase will have a larger aggregate effect in the long run than in the short run as more individuals accumulate in the price-sensitive nonsmoking group.

While many developing countries have devolved health care responsibilities to local governments in recent years, no study has examined whether decentralisation actually leads to greater health sector allocative efficiency. This paper approaches this question by modeling local government budgeting decisions under decentralisation. The model leads to conclusions not all favourable to decentralisation and produces several testable hypotheses concerning local government spending choices. For a brief empirical test of the model we look at data from Uganda. The data are of a type seldom available to researchers-actual local government budgets for the health sector in a developing country. The health budgets are disaggregated into specific types of activities based on a subjective characterisation of each activity's 'publicness'. The empirical results provide preliminary evidence that local government health planners are allocating declining proportions of their budgets to public goods activities.