This paper uses a pooled mean group (PMG) estimator to evaluate the effects of tax policy on state-level growth. We find that property and sales tax rates have negative effects on long-run income growth, while income tax rates have no impact.

Gravity models of international trade have been frequently applied to estimate the impact of common (official or spoken) language on bilateral trade. This study provides a meta-analysis based on 701 language effects collected from 81 academic articles. On average, a common (official or spoken)...

We examine the effect of a federally-funded local infrastructure spending program on local unemployment rates. To address the likely funding endogeneity problem, we exploit variation in spending due to pork-barreling, and find that higher government expenditure on roads substantially reduces...

This paper examines the small-sample performance of spatial HAC (SHAC) estimators of the standard errors on parameters. We find that, in small to moderately-sized datasets, the use of HAC estimators may be recommended only with a relatively large degree of cross-sectional interdependence.

There is a long and detailed history of attempts to understand what causes crime. One of the most prominent strands of this literature has sought to better understand the relationship between economic conditions and crime. An economic argument is that in an attempt to maintain consumption in the...

We apply Leeson and Dean’s (2009) method for studying democratic dominoes to capitalist spillovers to compare the rates at which capitalism and democracy spread between countries. We find that capitalism and democracy spread at approximately the same modest rate.

In this paper we provide estimates of the effects of international transport costs on firms’ exports and disentangle the channels of these effects. In so doing, we use a unique dataset consisting of highly disaggregated transaction-level trade and transport cost data and, in order to account...

We analyze whether landlocked regions are systematically poorer, using panel data for 1,527 regions in 83 nations from 1950-2014 and exploiting within-country-time variation. Lacking ocean access decreases regional GDP/capita by ≈13%. Specifically, coastal distance matters but not the length...