The growth of American governments in the twentieth century included large increases in funds for social insurance and public assistance. Social insurance has increased far more than public assistance, so "rise in the social insurance state" is a far better description of the century than "rise...

Social welfare programs in the United States are designed to serve as safety nets for people in hard times, in contrast with the universal approach found in many other developed western nations. In a survey of Cliometric studies of social welfare programs in the U.S., we examine the variation in...

In this paper we derive a model of aggregate investment that builds from the lumpy microeconomic behavior of firms facing stochastic fixed adjustment costs. Instead of the standard (S,s) bands, firms' optimal adjustment policies are probabilistic, with a probability of adjusting (adjustment...

This paper develops a method for joint estimation of both the degree of internal returns to scale and the extent of external economies. We apply the method in estimating returns to scale indexes for U.S. manufacturing industries at the two-digit level. Overall, we find that only three of the...