Over the last two decades, the literature on comparative development has moved from country-level to within-country analyses. The questions asked have expanded, as economists have used satellite images of light density at night and other big spatial data to proxy for development at the desired...

While empirical economics has made important strides over the past half century, there is a recent attack that threatens the foundations of the empirical approach in economics: external validity. Certain dogmatic arguments are not new, yet in some circles the generalizability question is beyond...

While significant work has been done to examine the determinants of regional development, there is little evidence on the contribution of air services toward this outcome. This paper exploits the unexpected market changes induced by the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act to bring new evidence on the...

We use data from the Tobacco Use Supplements to the Current Population Survey from 2006-2015 to calculate cigarette price elasticities of demand using four alternative cigarette tax/price measures that compensate for the local tax environment to various extents. We use both state-level prices...

Interstate Highway openings were permanent, anticipated demand shocks that increased gasoline demand and sometimes shifted it spatially. We investigate supply responses to these demand shocks, using county-level observations of service station counts and employment and data on highway openings'...

Do natural resources benefit producer economies, or is there a “Natural Resource Curse,”0 perhaps as the crowd-out of manufacturing productivity spillovers reduces long-term growth? We combine new data on oil and gas endowments with Census of Manufactures microdata to estimate how oil and...

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 study examines regional variation in average subsidy rates for charitable donations. Because the tax incentive for contributions is embodied in an itemized deduction, the subsidy rate for an individual depends on the taxpayer's itemization status and marginal tax rate. It is well know that...

This paper reports on an applied general equilibrium regional model for Canada which is used to investigate the regional effects of taxes. Earlier, literature on regional tax effects is reviewed and the main features of the model are briefly described. Existing literature on regional tax effects...

Recent empirical work uses variation across cities or regions to identify the effects of economic shocks of interest to macroeconomists. The interpretation of such estimates is complicated by the fact that they reflect both partial equilibrium and local general equilibrium effects of the shocks....