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
Journal Article
Anecdotes help Fed to steer the economy
Formal data don't tell policy-makers everything they need to know about the economy. The Federal Open Market Committee also pays attention to anecdotes gathered from the front lines of business.
Journal Article
Is the population boom a boon?
Journal Article
Have regional trade blocs diverted U.S. exports?
Working Paper
States and the business cycle
We model the U.S. business cycle using a dynamic factor model that identifies common factors underlying fluctuations in state-level income and employment growth. We find three such common factors, each of which is associated with a set of factor loadings that indicate the extent to which each state?s business cycle is related to the national business cycle. According to the factor loadings, there is a great deal of heterogeneity in the nature of the links between state and national economies. In addition to exhibiting interesting geographic patterns, the factor loadings tend to be related to ...
Working Paper
Journal rankings in economics: handle with care
Nearly all journal rankings in economics use some weighted average of citations to calculate a journal's impact. These rankings are often used, formally or informally, to help assess the publication success of individual economists or institutions. Although ranking methods and opinions are legion, scant attention has been paid to the usefulness of any ranking as representative of the many articles published in a journal. First, because the distributions of citations across articles within a journal are seriously skewed, and the skewness differs across journals, the appropriate measure of ...
Working Paper
Cross-border lobbying in preferential trading agreements: implications for external tariffs
This paper examines the effect of cross-border lobbying on domestic lobbying and on external tariffs in both Customs Union (CU) and Free Trade Area (FTA). We do so by developing a two-stage game which endogenizes the tariff formation function in a political economic model of the directly unproductive rent-seeking activities type. We find that cross-border lobbying unambiguously increases both domestic lobbying and the equilibrium common external tariffs in a CU. The same result also holds for FTA provided tariffs for the member governments are strategic complements. We also develop a specific ...