Given the slow growth of labor productivity in recent years, some have argued that the boost from information technology may have run its course Our analysis points to a less pessimistic conclusion While projections of economic developments are always difficult, our judgment is that "No, the...

The recent slowdown in the rate of decline for semiconductor prices suggested by the PPI is puzzling in light of evidence that the performance of MPUs has continued to improve at a rapid pace. The authors argue that hedonic indexes provide a more accurate measure of price changes.

Conditional value at risk (CoVaR) and marginal expected shortfall (MES) have been proposed as stock return based measures of the systemic risk created by individual financial institutions even though the literature provides no formal hypothesis test for detecting systemic risk. Our conclusion is...

We propose a model of voter decision-making in proportional representation systems: ultra-rational strategic voters construct expectations of coalitions and policy outcomes based on expected seat distributions and vote to maximize their expected utility from the implemented policy.

In this paper, we provide an economic analysis that distinguishes neutral and discriminatory state taxation of interstate commerce.

The failure of the largest banks will not generally endanger the solvency of their parent bank holding companies (BHCs), preventing the secretary of the Treasury from using single point of entry (SPOE).

We propose a model of voter decision-making in proportional representation systems: ultra-rational strategic voters construct expectations of coalitions and policy outcomes based on expected seat distributions and vote to maximize their expected utility from the implemented policy.

We use a large project-level dataset to estimate the length of the planning period for commercial construction projects in the United States. We find that these time-to-plan lags are long, averaging about 17 months when we aggregate the projects without regard to size and more than 28 months...

Our data show that land prices were more volatile than house prices during the recent boom/bust cycle. In areas where land was inexpensive in 2000, the land share of property value jumped during the boom, and this rise in the landshare was a useful predictor of the subsequent crash in house...