Texas border areas face a variety of economic challenges. In today's labor markets, income performance depends increasingly on productivity, which is primarily a function of educational attainment. To examine the extent to which education influences border region incomes, a cross-section...

Utilizing a unique sample of 253 microenterprise border retailers from El Paso, Texas, this paper explores the possibility of cash payment from cross-border shoppers using Mexican pesos. We find that one-fifth of microenterprise retailers in El Paso accept payment in Mexican pesos. Increased...

This paper focuses on actively managed portfolios of VIX derivatives constructed to reduce portfolio correlation with the equity market. We find that the best results are obtained using Kalman filter-based dynamic CAPM. The portfolio construction method is capable of constructing zero-beta...

Studies that estimate the Phillips curve for the U.S. use mainly national-level data and find mixed evidence of nonlinearity, with some recent studies either rejecting nonlinearity or estimating only modest convexity. In addition, most studies do not make a distinction between the relative...

This paper studies the e ffects of oil producing countries' fuel subsidies on the oil market and the world economy. We identify 24 oil producing countries with fuel subsidies where retail fuel prices are about 34 percent of the world price. We construct a two-country model where one country...

Rising income inequality and political polarization have led some to hypothesize that the two are causally linked. Properly interpreting such correlations is complicated by the multiple factors that drive each of these phenomena, potential feedbacks between inequality and polarization,...