While few economists analyzed criminal behaviour and the criminal justice process before Gary Becker’s seminal 1968 paper, an enormous body of economic research on crime has since been produced. This insightful and comprehensive Handbook reviews and extends much of this important...

This paper demonstrates that recent attempts to explain manufacturing shifts to nonmetropolitan areas can be synthesised into a capital vintage model of production. The result is a set of systematic differences between urban and rural production methods which are consistent with the locational...

Okun's Law is estimated for 26 states in the United States. An average of 3.1 percentage points of additional state-level output growth is found to be required for each percentage point reduction in a state's unemployment rate. Interstate differences in industrial mix, the age and gender...

A demand-based model of public sector spending is used to identify the economic determinants of the relative size of government in the United States for the period 1949 to 1998. The government's share of GDP is hypothesized to be a function of income growth (Wagner's Law), relative prices for...

Recent legislation has reduced federal tax rates and provided for indexation of the personal income tax against inflation. These changes are in part designed to reduce the relative size of government in the U.S. economy. Testing assump tions behind this proposition, this article examines the...

Static and dynamic translog cost models for the aggregate U.S. state and local government sector are estimated for 1952 to 1985. Inputs are capital, labor, and a combined nondurable goods and other services input, which includes "privatized" services. Estimates show that capital and labor are...