We use regional variation in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009-2012) to analyze the effect of government spending on consumer spending. Our consumption data come from household-level retail purchases in the Nielsen scanner data and auto purchases from Equifax credit balances. We...

We estimate the effect of legislative term limits on various categories of state government spending using the most recent panel of 47 states from 1972 to 2005. Besides the usual economic, political, fiscal and demographic factors, we also control for the state tax and expenditure limitations....

While it is well known that some areas of the United States receive more immigrants than others, less is understood about the extent to which the character of immigration varies as well. There is much broader geographic variation in the skill and demographic composition of immigrants than...

This paper explores the relationship between anti-miscegenation laws, interracial marriage and black males' geographical distribution in the U.S. during and after the Great Migration. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which forced the last 16 Southern...

A huge research literature, across the behavioral and social sciences, uses information on individuals' subjective well-being. These are responses to questions – asked by survey interviewers or medical personnel – such as "how happy do you feel on a scale from 1 to 4?" Yet there is little...

The economic expansion of the late 1990s created many opportunities for business creation in Silicon Valley, but the opportunity cost of starting a business was also high during this period because of the exceptionally tight labor market. A new measure of entrepreneurship derived from matching...

In this paper, we analyze the spatial distribution of US employment and earnings against an urban wage-efficiency background, where leisure and effort at work are complementary. Using data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for the period 2003-2014, we analyze the spatial distribution of...

Income inequality can be measured at different levels of aggregation such as global, continental, international and national levels. Here we consider income inequality at the national level but the focus is on the within country regional inequality. Regional inequality in income distribution in...

Life expectancy varies substantially across local regions within a country, raising conjectures that place of residence affects health. However, population sorting and other confounders make it difficult to disentangle the effects of place on health from other geographic differences in life...

This paper uses Indian EUS-NSSO data on 32 states/union territories and 570 districts for a bi-annual panel with 5 waves to estimate how regional population reacts to asymmetric shocks. These shocks are measured by non-employment rates, unemployment rates, and wages in fixed-effects regressions...