Merging procurement auction data with an employment dataset for highway construction firms in Texas, we provide evidence on the link between government construction spending and firm-level job creation in the highway construction industry during 1999-2006. Our results suggest that firms expand...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...

Kneller et al. (1999) examined the predictions of the public-policy endogenous growth models of Barro (1990) and others that suggest that unlike distortionary taxation and productive expenditures, nondistortionary taxation and nonproductive expenditures have no direct effect on the rate of...

The present paper analyzes how the welfare state, i.e., social insurance that works through redistributive taxation, should respond to increases in the skewness of the risk distribution. Income risks can be hedged either by individual self-insurance or by social insurance. It is shown that...

While a number of papers have addressed the costs and benefits of conscription, only one paper - Warner and Negrussa (2005) - considers the social welfare costs that result from efforts to illegally evade the draft. In this note, we address legal draft evasion - in particular, the use by of...

This article develops a theoretic analysis of the delicate relationship between wealth, economic confidence and preferences for redistribution. In our model, citizens are concerned with the risk of unemployment, but are also concerned about current income. A first result shows that this...

Since recent studies have argued that a pro-natalist effect could be obtained by introducing fertility-related pension systems for contrasting, especially in European countries, the plague of below-replacement fertility and the resulting problem of financing the widespread pay-as-you-go (PAYG)...

This paper provides a simple general equilibrium model with productive public spending and distorting taxes. The optimal conditions for the provision of public inputs are obtained under different tax systems. Also we discuss which factors affect the marginal cost of public funds.

This note is about the possibility of a stalemate in a continuing conflict. Following the prevailing economic literature on the topic, under some assumptions, the outcome of a conflict can be described in two ways: (i) a predetermined split of the contested output (ii) a winner-take-all contest...

This paper analyzes the effects of child allowance on households without a child with respect to the pay-as-you-go public pension system. We demonstrate that the child allowance can improve the utilities of households without a child through an increased pension benefits when the rate of...