This paper analyzes the importance of local interaction between individuals of different linguistic groups for the provision of public goods at the national level. The micro-founded conceptual framework we develop predicts that a country's public goods (i) decrease in its overall linguistic...

"We examine how financial expansion and contraction cycles affect the broader economy through their impact on 8 real economic sectors in a panel of 28 countries over 1960-2005, paying particular attention to large, or sharp, contractions and magnifying and mitigating factors. Overall, the...

"In this paper we propose a new approach to international comparisons of real GDP measured from the output-side. The traditional Geary-Khamis system to measure real GDP from the expenditure-side is modified to include differences in the terms of trade between countries. It is shown that this...

This paper uses an updated and revised panel data set on ambient air pollution in cities world-wide to examine the robustness of the evidence for the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between national income and pollution. We test the sensitivity of the pollution-income relationship...

Aggregate shocks that move output and inflation in opposite directions create a tradeoff between output and inflation variability, forcing central bankers to make a choice. Differences in the degree of accommodation of shocks lead to disparate variability outcomes, revealing national central...

Corporate investment is the most important factor to explain the long stagnation of Japan during the 1990's. Using the Bank of Japan diffusion indices of real profitability' and banks' willingness to lend', we estimate investment functions for four groups of firms: large/small and...

This paper characterizes the dynamic effects of shocks in government spending and taxes on economic activity in the United States in the post-war period. It does so by using a mixed structural VAR/event study approach. Identification is achieved by using institutional information about the tax...

Standard explanations of the bivariate correlation of money and income attribute this correlation to an inability of agents to discriminate in the short run between real and nominal sources of price shocks. This paper is an empirical comparison of the standard explanation with two alternatives:...

As an aid to interpreting the results of height-by-age studies this paper investigates the relationship between average height and per capita income. The relationships among income, nutrition, medical care, and height at the individual level suggest that average height is nonlinearly related to...