Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Estimating Marginal Willingness to Pay for Differentiated Products Without Instrumental Variables

The hedonic model of Rosen (1974) has become a workhorse for valuing the characteristics of differentiated products despite a number of well-documented econometric problems. For example, Bartik (1987) and Epple (1987) each describe a source of endogeneity in the second stage of Rosen's procedure that has proven difficult to overcome. In this paper, we propose a new approach for recovering the marginal willingness-to-pay function that altogether avoids these endogeneity problems. Applying this estimator to data on large changes in violent crime rates, we find that marginal willingness-to-pay increases by ten cents with each additional violent crime per 100,000 residents.

Exploring Gender Roles and Gender Equality within the Evangelical Church

This research aims to facilitate better understanding of perceptions of gender roles and gender equality among members of the Evangelical Church and to determine whether these perceptions differ by gender. The evangelical community’s ideologies and values have come to shape social and political dialogues within the United States. A key component of the faith is understanding the role each member plays within his or her family unit and community at large. The evangelical faith’s organizational structure and ideologies are informed by a patriarchal model that’s placed women at internal and structural odds, based on research exploring evangelically informed organizations. However, there is a gap in literature related to gender roles and equality within the faith, and how these perceptions may differ by gender and the influence a church’s organizational structure may have on these perceptions. This process involved the examination of perceptions of gender among evangelical Christians in a nationally representative sample. These findings informed a series of questions designed to explore, at greater depth on a regional level, the views of evangelicals regarding gender roles and gender equality within their organizations. The study provided a multidimensional construct of how the evangelical community defines themselves, understands gender roles and gender equality, and how these definitions affirm and conflict with definitions outside of the church as well as their own church’s leadership and organizational structure

The dimension of the Brownian frontier is greater than 1

Consider a planar Brownian motion run for finite time. The frontier or ``outer boundary'' of the path is the boundary of the unbounded component of the complement. Burdzy (1989) showed that the frontier has infinite length. We improve this by showing that the Hausdorff dimension of the frontier is strictly greater than 1. (It has been conjectured that the Brownian frontier has dimension $4/3$, but this is still open.) The proof uses Jones's Traveling Salesman Theorem and a self-similar tiling of the plane by fractal tiles known as Gosper Islands