We conduct a résumé audit to estimate the impact of unemployment and underemployment on the employment prospects facing recent college graduates. We find no evidence that employers use current or past unemployment spells, regardless of their length, to inform hiring decisions. By contrast,...

We present experimental evidence from a correspondence test of racial discrimination in the labor market for recent college graduates. Online job advertisements were answered with over 9,000 résumé s from fictitious, recently-graduated job seekers. We find strong evidence of differential...

In this paper, we attempt to provide an economic explanation for the adoption of bill co-sponsorship by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1967. We demonstrate empirically that key features of legislative production prior to 1967 (when House members’ support for a bill was indicated by...

We investigate whether a change in the expectation of child custody affects the amount of time that married mothers and fathers devote to market and household work. Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) coupled with plausibly exogenous variation in the adoption of joint-custody...

This paper examines the impact of inflation, (un)employment, and stock market growth on the rates of larceny, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and robbery. The study uses U.S. data for the time period 1948 to 2009. We employ an unobserved component approach to circumvent the problems associated...

Fluctuations in aggregate crime rates contrary to recent shifts in the age distribution of the U.S. population have cast doubt on the predictive power of the age-crime hypothesis. By examining a longer time horizon, back to the early 1930s,, we show that the percentage of the young population is...

This paper investigates the effect of dollar depreciation on the US tourism trade balance. Export revenue and import spending functions are estimated separately with structural vector autoregressive methods to better capture dynamic adjustments to exchange rate shocks. Quarterly data cover the...

This note discusses a pitfall of using the generalized impulse response function (GIRF) in vector autoregressive (VAR) models (Pesaran and Shin, 1998). The GIRF is general because it is invariant to the ordering of the variables in the VAR. The GIRF, in fact, is extreme because it yields a set...

This paper develops a competitive model of trade between three countries with constant cost production and identical utility functions. Trade depends on country size and productivity, and may be limited to two of the countries. Regional trade is observed if they happen to be closer together. The...

This paper demonstrates that institutional factors influence the subjective well-being of individuals differently in rich versus poor countries. A lower level of corruption, a more democratic government and better civil rights increase the well-being of individuals in rich countries, whereas an...