I perform an empirical analysis of Euler equations for the firm's choices of capital, labor, hours, and debt. Financial structure has real effects , since taxes favor debt. However, the cost of debt increases with the debt-to-collateral ratio, and capital is part of collateral. The data, for...

Competition among state and local governments to lure businesses has attracted considerable interest from economists, as well as legislators and policymakers. This paper quantifies the role of plant relocations in the geographic redistribution of manufacturing employment and examines the...

A study of whether states differ in terms of technical inefficiency in their manufacturing sectors.

An examination of the relative shapes of the wage distribution in the U.S. goods-producing and service-producing sectors that uses a nonparametric measure of density overlap to analyze wage differences between the two sectors over time. ; What implications do 21st century monetary innovations...

An examination of the role of productivity differences in explaining the decline of manufacturing activity in large metropolitan areas relative to the rest of the country, with special attention given to the decline of the large metropolitan areas of the Manufacturing Belt.

An analysis of the relationship between local public capital stock and regional manufacturing output, inputs, and productivity between 1965 and 1977. Results show that the effect of public capital stock on regional productivity, although limited, cannot be dismissed, and that public...

A nonparametric analysis of the similarity between goods and services wage densities, applying kernel density estimates and an overlap statistic to U.S. weekly full-time wages from 1969 to 1993.

We provide a theoretical interpretation of two features of international data: the countercyclical movements in net exports and the tendency for the trade balance to be negatively correlated with current and future movements in the terms of trade, but positively correlated with past movements....

This paper investigates the effect of uncertainty on the investment decisions of petroleum refineries in the US. We construct uncertainty measures from commodity futures market and use data on actual capacity changes to measure investment episodes. Capacity changes in US refineries occur...

An analysis of the quantitative effects of agency costs in a real business cycle model, showing that these costs can explain why output growth displays positive autocorrelation at short horizons.