Application of the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no-fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates. Each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of divorce rates across US states has yielded...

Most states in the U.S. allow for unilateral divorce, which increases the ease of divorce by not requiring the explicit consent of both partners. Such regulations have come under fire for their perceived negative consequences for marital stability and resulting child outcomes, but there is no...

This paper uses data on adopted children to examine the relative importance of biology and environment in determining educational and labor market outcomes. I employ three long-term panel data sets which contain information on adopted children, their adoptive parents, and their biological...

The creation of the euro and the European Central Bank is a remarkable and unprecedented event in economic and political history: creating a supranational central bank and leaving eleven countries without national currencies of their own. The experience of the first year confirms that one size...

This paper is the first to study empirically the effects of European antidumping actions on import diversion from importers 'named' in an antidumping investigation, and potentially subject to protectionist measures, to countries not named' in the investigation. For this purpose we use a unique...

Borrowing from the experience of environmental markets, this paper proposes a system of tradable deficit permits as an efficient mechanism for implementing fiscal constraints in the European Monetary Union: having chosen an aggregate target for the Union and an initial distribution of permits,...

In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

Available studies on asymmetries in the monetary transmission mechanism within Europe are invariably based on macro-economic evidence: such evidence is abundant but often contradictory. This paper takes a different route by using micro-economic data. We use the information contained in the...

The paper discusses the choice between inflation targeting and monetary targeting as a strategy for the Eurosystem, the actual strategy the Eurosystem announced in the fall of 1998, the framework for policy decisions appropriate for achieving the goals of the Eurosystem, the role of exchange...

Among the many challenges facing the new Eurosystem is the possibility that the regions of the euro area will respond differently to interest rate changes. In this essay, I provide evidence that differences in financial structure are the proximate cause for these national asymmetries in the...