The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was the US government's fiscal response to the Great Recession. An important component of ARRA's $796 billion proposed budget was $318 billion in fiscal assistance to state and local governments. We examine the historical experience of federal...

Using a sample of the 48 mainland U.S. states for the period 1973-2009, we study the ability of U.S. states to expand own state employment through the use of state deficit policies. The analysis allows for the facts that U.S. states are part of a wider monetary and economic union with free...

This chapter reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then describe how these factors are frequently measured in the data and some resulting empirical regularities....

We propose a theory of firm dynamics in which workers have ideas for new projects that can be sold in a market to existing firms or implemented in new firms: spin-offs. Workers have private information about the quality of their ideas. Because of an adverse selection problem, workers can sell...

This paper investigates the possibility of sunspots equilibria and endogenous cycles in an overlapping generations model with strategic interactions. We consider an economy with imperfectly competitive product markets. There is a participation decision on the part of prospective firms and a...

We study the stochastic behavior of a dynamic general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition. Each seller sells his product in the consumption goods as well as the investment goods market and has market power in both. Consumers derive utility from a CES aggregate of all the consumption...