This paper is an attempt to assess the existence and magnitude of local research spillovers in France. We rely on the model of an extended production function (Cobb-Douglas and Translog) with both local and neighborhood Ramp;D capital stocks. We estimate this model on 312 employment areas as of...

At political boundaries, local leaders often have weak incentives to reduce polluting activity because the social costs are borne by downstream neighbors. This paper exploits a natural experiment set in China in which the central government changed the local political promotion criteria and...

We investigate how the number and size of local political jurisdictions in an area is determined. Our model focuses on the tradeoff between the benefits of economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population. We consider heterogeneity in income, race, ethnicity, and religion, and we...

This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of Jamaican standards of living and income inequality around 1774. To this purpose we compute welfare ratios for a range of occupations and build a social table. We find that the slave colony had extremely high living costs, which rose...

We investigate the effects of inward FDI on income distribution and absolute living standards in Vietnam using census data from 1989-2009. We compute the number of employees of foreign establishments in each of Vietnam's provinces for each year, and use that as a measure of local FDI. We...

This paper investigates the biological standard of living toward the end of Spanish rule. We investigate levels, trends, and determinants of physical stature from the birth cohorts of the 1860s to the 1890s using data on 23,000 Filipino soldiers enlisted by the U.S. military between 1901 and...

Suicide rates, life evaluation, and measures of affect are all plausible measures of the mental health and wellbeing of populations. Yet in the settings we examine, correlations between suicide and measured wellbeing are at best inconsistent. Differences in suicides between men and women,...

A growing literature examines the effects of economic variables on obesity, typically focusing on only one or a few factors at a time. We build a more comprehensive economic model of body weight, combining the 1990-2010 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System with 27 state-level variables...