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Journal Article
The effects of recessions across demographic groups
The burdens of a recession are not spread evenly across demographic groups. As the public and media noticed, from the start of the current recession in December 2007 through June 2009 men accounted for more than three-quarters of net job losses. Other differences have garnered less attention but are just as interesting. During the same period, the employment of single people fell at more than twice the rate that it did for married people and the decline for black workers was one and a half times that for white workers. To provide a more complete understanding of the effect of recessions, this ...
Journal Article
Need and the need for favors motivate foreign aid decisions
Bermuda gets $46,000 a year, while Iraq receives $2.3 billion. What motivates donors to give aid to other countries? Need-and the need for favors.
Journal Article
The determinants of aid in the post-cold war era
The authors estimate the responsiveness of aid to recipient countries' economic and physical needs, civil/political rights, and government effectiveness. They look exclusively at the post-Cold War era and use fixed effects to control for the political, strategic, and other considerations of donors. They find that aid and per capita income have been negatively related, while aid has been positively related to infant mortality, rights, and government effectiveness.
Journal Article
To bear, or not to bear: is that an economics question?
Weighing the costs vs. the benefits of having children may seem like a cold-blooded exercise. Yet such an analysis can help us understand not only such private decisions but public policies, too.
Journal Article
Price stability and the rising tide: how low inflation lifts all ships
The low and stable inflation that the Fed has relentlessly pursued over the past decade or so has buoyed virtually all demographic groups, enabling most Americans to do a lot more than just keep their heads above water.
Journal Article
Has Japan been left out in the cold by regional integration?
Despite the ongoing worldwide trend toward regional integration, Japan has remained outside of all regional trading agreements. Because more than 60 percent of Japan?s trade is with countries that are members of a major regional bloc, this reluctance may have had significant effects on its pattern and volume of trade. Indeed, the author finds that Japan?s exports have been reduced by the integration of its trading partners, and that this effect has been fairly uniform across integration regimes. The author also finds that regional trading agreements have tended to have a much more negative ...
Journal Article
Recessions, expansions and black employment
Journal Article
The revealed cost of unemployment
The costs of unemployment usually are stated in terms of the amount of aggregate income that is foregone because of resources left idle. Although useful, this method does not provide all of the information necessary for normative analysis. In this article, Stratford Douglas and Howard J. Wall propose an alternative that measures the cost of regional and national unemployment by the amount that people would be willing to pay to avoid it. The authors' model treats unemployment as a region-specific disamenity, and uses regional cross-migration data to reveal preferences towards income and ...
Journal Article
Using the gravity model to estimate the costs of protection
Many economists expend a lot of energy decrying trade protectionism; nonetheless, their estimates of the actual burden that protectionism imposes on the economy have been surprisingly small. In this article, Howard J. Wall presents a method that captures some of the effects and distortions of trade protection which have not been captured by existing methods. Wall finds that during 1996, worldwide protectionism reduced U.S. exports by 26.2 percent. Likewise, U.S. protectionism decreased U.S. imports from non-NAFTA countries by 15.4 percent. He calculates further that the welfare cost of U.S. ...
Journal Article
A journal ranking for the ambitious economist
The authors devise an "ambition-adjusted" journal ranking based on citations from a short list of top general-interest journals in economics. Underlying this ranking is the notion that an ambitious economist wishes to be acknowledged not only in the highest reaches of the profession, but also outside his or her subfield. In addition to the conceptual advantages that they find in their ambition adjustment, they see two main practical advantages: greater transparency and a consistent treatment of subfields. They compare their 2008 ranking based on citations from 2001 to 2007 with a ranking ...