Economists have studied the impact of numerous state laws, from welfare rules to voting ID requirements. Yet for all this policy evaluation, what do we know about policy diffusion—how these policies spread from state to state? We present a series of facts based on a data set of over 700 U.S....

This work offers new insights into the determinants of service offshoring across countries and across service industries. Combining different data sources over the 2006-2009 period, I find that certain country characteristics affect offshoring costs for all services, while the effects of other...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relations among characteristics of U.S. firms, their tendency to invest abroad, and their choice of production locations. The larger the firm, and the higher its profitability, capital intensity, technological Intensity, and the skill level ofits labor...

In this paper the impact of the corporate tax systems of the 15 EU-member states on the investment and the financing decision of an US multinational corporation is analysed. The calculation of the resulting effective marginal tax rates (EMTR) closely follow the model of King and Fullerton. There...

Using a sample of the 48 mainland U.S. states for the period 1973-2009, we study the ability of U.S. states to expand own state employment through the use of state deficit policies. The analysis allows for the facts that U.S. states are part of a wider monetary and economic union with free...

There is limited existing evidence justifying the economic case for state education policy. Using newly-developed measures of the human capital of each state that allow for internal migration and foreign immigration, we estimate growth regressions that incorporate worker skills. We find that...

This paper analyses the general incorporation statutes for manufacturing firms adopted by the American states up to 1860. Prior to the enactment of a general law, a business could only incorporate by obtaining a special act of their state legislature; general statutes facilitated incorporation...

We use a novel data set spanning 1820-1910 to examine the origins of bank supervision and assess factors leading to the creation of formal bank supervision across U.S. states. We show that it took more than a century for the widespread adoption of independent supervisory institutions tasked with...