Economics Department
Distribution, inflation, and public industrial enterprises
A Kaleckian model, featuring the complementarity of the public and private sectors and administered pricing of public-sector products, is developed to examine the impact of public enterprises on income distribution between the state, capital, and labor. Public-sector mark-up and relative...
Do fringe benefits cause layoffs?
It is commonly believed that firms prefer layoffs to worksharing, in part, because layoffs economize on fringe benefit costs. We find that when labor markets are characterized by optimal implicit contracts, layoffs will never occur in equilibrium, regardless of the...
Do Immigrant Inflows Affect Native Location Decisions?
This paper investigates the relationship between immigrant inflows and native outflows in US metropolitan areas, using data from the Current Population Survey during the period from 2005-2014. Simple linear regression suggests a significant positive effect of immigrant population growth on...
Do NGOs make a difference: a case study of rural Rajasthan
An empirical analysis of effects of NGO interventions on health and education of women and girls in rural Rajasthan employs an original micro data set to address criticisms of NGO effectiveness. Isolating the effects of the NGO's programs from personal...
Does post-graduate education affect women's investment in health? A study of the determinants of preventative health
Does the well established positive association between education and investment in health hold for education beyond college? This study examines the effect of having a postgraduate degree on investment in health, using an original data set composed of samples of...
Does social capital compound moral hazard? evidence from Naloxone access
Does Speculation Make Commodity Spot Markets More Volatile?
This paper examines how increased speculator participation in the commodity
futures market affects spot price volatility. Consistent with results from the
majority of existing literature on this subject, I find no evidence that speculators
destabilize the commodity spot market. More...
Donor influence in Multilateral Development Banks: the case of the Asian Development Bank
This paper explores the influence of Japan and the United States over the geographic distribution of Asian Development Bank (ADB) funds. Although nominally an independent, multilateral organization, the ADB is widely regarded as bowing to the interests of its two...
Effects of female literacy in villages in rural Rajasthan
Energy Consumption and Habit Formation: Evidence from High Frequency Thermostat Data
Using minute-by-minute data from over 60,000 smart thermostats in households distributed across the United States, we analyze the persistence of energy consumption behaviors in response to external weather shocks. The analysis examines habitual behavior and provides insight into what affects...
Fiscal Multipliers in a Financially Globalized World
This paper establishes a relationship between levels of dollariza- tion and the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus. We show that low dollarized economies experience an appreciation of currency from an increase in fiscal stimulus this causes a positive wealth effect leading...
Foreign aid and domestic politics: Voting in congress and the allocation of USAID contracts across congressional districts
This paper investigates the relationship between congressional support for foreign aid and the distribution of USAID contract spending across congressional districts within the United States. The extent to which such a relationship matters has become increasingly important in recent years...
Growth econometrics
This paper provides a survey and synthesis of econometric tools that have been employed to study economic growth. While these tools range across a variety of statistical methods, they are united in the common goals of first, identifying interesting contemporaneous...
How budget deficits cause trade deficits: The simple analytics
The traditional classroom presentation of international macroeconomic issues obscures the link between budget deficits, exchange rates, and the trade deficit. The article offers a simple supply and demand framework to clarify the role of budget deficits in creating trade deficits...
How do political changes influence U.S. bilateral aid allocations? Evidence from panel data
This paper examines the role of U.S. domestic politics in the allocation of foreign aid using panel data on aid to 119 countries from 1960 to 1997. Employing proxies for four aid allocation criteria (development concerns, strategic importance, commercial importance...
How much are secrets worth? An asset pricing study on trade secret risks
Industrialization, distortions, and growth in developing countries
Inequality in Pakistan, 1984-85 to 1987-88: A social welfare approach
This paper presents new results on income distribution in Pakistan from an analysis of the full HIES data tapes for 1984-85, 1985-86, 1986-87, and 1987-88. An explicit social welfare methodology is adopted to measure changes in inequality at the national...
Inflation, growth, and import bottlenecks in the Turkish manufacturing sector
This paper argues that, in economies heavily dependent on imported inputs, the responsiveness of price and output to cost and demand factors are altered by foreign exchange bottlenecks if the government resorts to nonmarket allocation of import licenses. A model...