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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
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 ...