In this paper we study the importance of marriage for interstate risk sharing. We find that US states in which married couples account for a higher share of the population are less exposed to state-specific output shocks. Thus, marriages do not just improve the allocation of risk at the...

We estimate the impact of hurricane strikes on local economic growth rates and how this is reflected in more aggregate growth patterns. To this end we assemble a panel data set of US coastal counties' growth rates and construct a hurricane destruction index that is based on a monetary loss...

Public support of research typically relies on the notion that universities are engines of economic development, and that university research is a primary driver of high wage localized economic activity. Yet the evidence supporting that notion is based on aggregate descriptive data, rather than...

We examine the impact of real oil price shocks on labor market flows in the US We first use smooth transition regression (STR) models to investigate to what extent oil prices can be considered as a driving force of labor market fluctuations. Then we develop and calibrate a modified version of...

This study empirically examines the fragility of five major Asian economies (China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, and South Korea) to economic policy uncertainty (EPU) of US and EU, and oil prices in different state of the economies. To investigate these dynamics, we use the relative tail dependence...

Are American workers less likely to observe a religious holiday now than they were 30 years ago? In this paper I use evidence from religious holidays to explore the evolution of market hours' flexibility and religious observance during the last thirty years. To do so, I take advantage of three...

Labour market policies settled at national level imply a "one-size-fits-all" labour market strategy. This strategy might not sufficiently take into account region-specific economic structures. In this paper we employ a panel factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) to evaluate whether...

We estimate direct and indirect effects of total factor productivity growth in manufacturing on US workers' earnings, housing costs, and purchasing power. Drawing on four alternative instrumental variables, we consistently find that when a city experiences productivity gains in manufacturing,...

This paper investigates the impact of oil price variations on sectoral inflation for a sample of 10 top oil importing and exporting countries. Specifically, we analyze the effects of oil prices on the consumer price index using monthly data spanning the July 2009 to February 2021 period. Two...

Revealing the precise thresholds at which fluctuations in oil prices start to affect gross domestic product and its various components (consumption, investment, expenditure and exports) holds significant implications for policymakers in both oil-importing and oil-exporting countries. Existing...