Search Results
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
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
Recessions, expansions and black employment
Working Paper
The 2001 recession and the states of the Eighth Federal Reserve District
This paper examines and compares the recent business cycle experiences of the seven states that lie partly or wholly within the Eighth Federal Reserve District (Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee). For the period surrounding the 1990-91 NBER recession, six of the seven states had recessions that were much shorter than for the country as a whole. For the period surrounding the 2001 NBER recession, four states-Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee-entered and exited recession earlier than the country as a whole. Recessions in the other three states ...
Working Paper
Immigration and outsourcing: a general equilibrium analysis
We analyze the effects of outsourcing in the presence of a minimum wage by presenting a general-equilibrium model with an oligopolistic export sector and a competitive import-competing sector. An outsourcing tax is politically popular because it switches jobs to unemployed natives. It is also economically sound because it raises national income. An export subsidy may or may not be justified on welfare grounds. Increased international competition has no effect on the level of outsourcing, but the direction of its effect on unemployment and national income depends on the relative factor ...
Working Paper
Creating a policy environment for entrepreneurs
This paper demonstrates that levels of entrepreneurship can be greatly affected by the general policy environment. Using a state-level panel, we estimate the effects of several policy variables on rates of entrepreneurship and find that bankruptcy exemptions, corporate tax rates, and the level of the minimum wage all affect a state's rate of entrepreneurship. For the median state, these policies reduced the level of entrepreneurship by 10.5 percent. Much of the geographic pattern of entrepreneurship can be explained by policy differences: The low-entrepreneurship states of the Great Lakes and ...
Working Paper
Ethnic networks and U.S. exports
This paper provides new estimates of the effects of ethnic networks on U.S. exports. In line with recent research, our dataset is a panel of exports from U.S. states to 29 foreign countries. Our analysis departs from the literature in two ways, both of which show that previous estimates of the ethnic-network elasticity of trade are sensitive to the restrictions imposed on the estimated models. Our first departure is to control for unobserved heterogeneity with properly specified fixed effects, which we can do because our dataset contains a time dimension absent from previous studies. Our ...
Working Paper
Policy evaluation in the presence of outsourcing: global competitiveness versus political feasibility
We analyze the effects of outsourcing in the presence of a minimum wage by presenting a general-equilibrium model with an oligopolistic export sector and a competitive import-competing sector. An outsourcing tax is politically popular because it switches jobs to unemployed natives. It is also economically sound because it raises national income. An export subsidy may or may not be justified on welfare grounds. Increased international competition has no effect on the level of outsourcing, but the direction of its effect on unemployment and national income depends on the relative factor ...
Working Paper
Regional VARs and the channels of monetary policy
We find that the magnitudes of the regional effects of monetary policy were considerably dampened during the Volcker-Greenspan era. Further, regional differences in the depths of monetary-policy-induced recessions are related to the concentration of the banking sector, whereas differences in the total cost of these recessions are related to industry mix.