We find that presidential and congressional influences affect the rate of disaster declaration and the allocation of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) disaster expenditures across states. States politically important to the president have a higher rate of disaster declaration by the...

Previous studies find state lottery sales are significantly influenced by socioeconomic characteristics of the population. We extend this literature by examining how the overall expected value, the top prize, and the total combinations influence sales after controlling for these other...

We apply spatial econometric techniques to models of state and local fiscal policy convergence. Total tax revenue and expenditures, as well as broad tax and expenditure categories, of state and local governments in each of the 48 contiguous U.S. states are examined. We extend work by Scully...

Using a theoretical extension of the Friedman and Savage (1948) utility function developed in Bhattacharyya (2003), we predict that for financial assets with negative expected returns, expected return will be a declining and convex function of skewness. Using a sample of U.S. state lottery...

Statistics on the size and growth of the U.S. federal government, along with the rhetoric of President Franklin Roosevelt, seem to indicate that the Great Depression was the event that started the dramatic growth in government spending and intervention in the private sector that has continued to...

This note demonstrates why regression coefficients and their statistical significance differ across degrees of data aggregation. Given the frequent use of aggregated data to explain individual behavior, data aggregation can result in misleading conclusions regarding the economic behavior of...

Legislation passed during the 1990s attempted to move U.S. agriculture disaster relief to a more market oriented process. The failure of this legislation has been attributed to the political system behind agricultural disaster relief. This paper explores the impact of political influence on the...

This paper tests the ability of consumer sentiment to predict retail spending at the state level. The results here suggest that, although there is a significant relationship between sentiment measures and retail sales growth in several states, consumer sentiment exhibits only modest predictive...

This paper measures the extent to which destination resort casinos export bankruptcy back to visitors' home states. Previous literature has alluded to this possibility, but to date studies have only examined the influence of local casinos on local bankruptcy. Using various survey data, we...

This paper presents new evidence of spatial correlation in U.S. state income growth. We extend the basic spatial econometric model used in the growth literature by allowing spatial correlation in state income growth to vary across geographic regions. We find positive spatial correlation in...