We analyze optimal vaccine subsidies in a model integrating disease epidemiology into a market with rational economic agents. The focus is on an intensive vaccine campaign to quell an epidemic in the short run. Across a range of market structures, positive vaccine externalities and optimal subsidies peak for diseases that spread quickly, but not so quickly that everyone is driven to be vaccinated. We assess the practical relevance of this peak—as well as the existence of increasing social returns to vaccination and optimality of universal vaccination—in calibrations to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Economics papers increasingly report balance, pre-trend, placebo, and other “sniff tests,” rejection of which is bad news for authors, undermining the credibility of their main results. We derive nonparametric bounds on the latent proportion of significant sniff tests removed by the publication process (whether by p-hacking or relegation to the file drawer) and the proportion whose significance was due to true misspecification, not bad luck. Using a hand-collected sample of nearly 30,000 sniff tests, we estimate a removal rate of over 30% for balance tests in randomized controlled trials and a misspecification rate of over 40% for other tests.

Does online availability boost citations? Using a panel of citations to economics and business journals, we show that the enormous effects found in previous studies were an artifact of their failure to control for article quality, disappearing once fixed effects are added as controls. The absence of aggregate effects masks heterogeneity across platforms: JSTOR has a uniquely large effect, boosting citations around 10%. We examine other sources of heterogeneity, including whether JSTOR disproportionately increases cites from developing countries or to “long-tail” articles. Our theoretical analysis informs the econometric specification and allows citation increases to be translated into welfare terms.

In a privatization competition, private contractors bid against an in-house team to perform a governmental function that is currently performed by the in-house team. The Department of Defense initiated 3,500 privatization competitions from 1978 to 1994, generating estimated annual savings of $1.46 billion. We estimate a reduced-form model of the savings from these competitions that takes into account the premature cancellation of some competitions and the censoring of the in-house bid at current cost. The Department of Defense maintains a list of candidates for future privatization competitions. Using our model, we forecast annual savings of $5.74 billion if privatization competitions were completed for all functions on this list.

We examine the effect of buyer merger on bilateral negotiations between a supplier and n buyers. Merger may have bargaining effects in addition to the usual efficiency effects. The effect of merger on the buyers' bargaining position depends on the curvature of the supplier's gross surplus function: merger enhances (worsens) the buyers' bargaining position if the function is concave (convex). Based on a panel of advertising revenue in the cable television industry, our estimates indicate that the gross surplus function for suppliers of program services is convex. This result suggests that cable operators integrate horizontally to realize efficiency gains rather than to enhance their bargaining position vis-a-vis program suppliers.