Karen B. Clay
Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy
Heinz School of Public Policy and Management
5000 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Email: kclay@andrew.cmu.edu
Phone: 412-268-4197, Fax: 412-268-7902
Office: 2116C Hamburgh Hall

Teaching: Industrial Organization, Economic Analysis
Research: Economic History, Industrial Organization, Economics of Information
Seminars: Applied Microeconomics Workshop
Courtesy Appointment: Tepper School of Business

Current Vita

Selected Working Papers and Recent Publications

· Economic History

· Lead Pipes and Child Mortality (with Werner Troesken)

· Deprivation and Disease in Early Twentieth Century America (with Werner Troesken)

· Squatters, Production, and Violence

· The Effect of Uncertain Property Rights on Agricultural Production: Evidence from Post Gold Rush California

· Judicial Independence, Elections, and Minority Interests (with Dan Berkowitz and Chris Bonneau)

· The Effect of Judicial Independence on Courts: Evidence from the American States (with Dan Berkowitz), Journal of Legal Studies, Forthcoming 2006.

· American Civil Law Origins: Implications for State Constitutions and State Courts (with Dan Berkowitz), American Law and Economics Review, Spring 2005.

· Order without Law: Property Rights During the California Gold Rush (with Gavin Wright), Explorations in Economic History, April 2005.

· Further Tests of Static Oligopoly Models: Whiskey, 1882-1898 (with Werner Troesken), Journal of Industrial Economics, June 2003.

· Strategic Behavior and Market Structure in Whiskey Distilling, 1887-1895 (with Werner Troesken), Journal of Economic History, December 2002.

· Electronic Commerce

· Price Discrimination with Experience Goods: A Structural Econometric Analysis (with Ron Goettler)

· Bigger may not be Better: An Empirical Analysis of Optimal Membership Rules in Peer to Peer Networks (with Atip Asvunund, Ramayya Krishnan, and Michael Smith) Information Systems Research, 2004

· Designing a Better Shopbot (with Alan Montgomery, Kartik Hosanager, and Ramayya Krishnan). Management Science, February 2004.

· Retail Strategies on the Web: Price and Non-Price Competition in the Online Book Industry (with Ramayya Krishnan, Eric Wolff, and Danny Fernnades), Journal of Industrial Economics, September 2003. The results of a small-scale study of the physical and Internet channels.

· Prices and Price Dispersion on the Web: Evidence from the Online Book Industry (with Ramayya Krishnan and Eric Wolff), Journal of Industrial Economics, December 2001. (NBER Working Paper 8271) The results of a larger study covering August 1999-January 2000.

· Gold Rush data:  El Dorado

· Gold Rush PowerPoint

· Biographical Information

· Professor Clay received her B.A. in Economics (Highest Honors) and Mathematics from University of Virginia in 1988. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University in 1994. From 1994 to 1999, Professor Clay was an Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Toronto. Since 1999, she has been an Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy in the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University