Between 2007 and 2009, government expenditures increased rapidly across the OECD countries. While economic research on the impact of government purchases has flourished, in the data, about three quarters of the increase in expenditures in the United States (and more in other countries) was in...

Many organizations have budgets that expire at the end of the fiscal year. Faced with uncertainty over future spending demands, these organizations have an incentive to build up a rainy day fund over the first part of the year. If demand does not materialize, they must rush to spend these...

This paper investigates the relation between growth forecast errors and planned fiscal consolidation during the crisis. We find that, in advanced economies, stronger planned fiscal consolidation has been associated with lower growth than expected, with the relation being particularly strong,...

Japan's deteriorating fiscal situation has attracted international attention. I assess what current Japanese government policies mean for the future of public debt and the economy in general, given the inevitable aging of the population. I review how Japan got into this current fiscal mess, and...

In this paper, we consider a number of issues regarding crime prevention and criminal justice. We begin by considering how crime is measured and present both general and specific evidence on the level of crime in a variety of countries. Crime is pervasive and varies substantially across...

School choice plans in many cities grant students higher priority for some (but not all) seats at their neighborhood schools. This paper demonstrates how the precedence order, i.e. the order in which different types of seats are filled by applicants, has quantitative effects on distributional...

Understanding potential spillovers from the attributes and actions of neighborhood residents onto the value of surrounding properties and neighborhoods is central to both the theory of urban economics and the development of efficient housing policy. This paper measures the capitalization of...

In a model of evolution driven by conflict between societies more powerful states have an advantage. When the influence of outsiders is small we show that this results in a tendency to hegemony. In a simple example in which institutions differ in their "exclusiveness" we find that these...

I consider four policies created to address the financial crisis: (1) the ability-to-repay requirement in mortgage underwriting; (2) reform of rating agency compensation, (3) risk retention in securitization, and (4) mandatory loan renegotiation. I show that according to standard models,...

FTA bilateral and regional negotiations in Asia have developed quickly in the past decade moving Asia ever closer to an economic union. Unlike Europe with the EU and the 1997 treaty of Rome and the 1993 NAFTA in North American, Asian economic integration does not involve a comprehensive trade...