Much of the literature examining the effects of oil shocks asks the question “What is an oil shock?” and has concluded that oil-price increases are asymmetric in their effects on the US economy. That is, sharp increases in oil prices affect economic activity adversely, but sharp decreases in...

A large literature studies the information contained in national-level economic indicators, such as financial and aggregate economic activity variables, for forecasting U.S. business cycle phases (expansions and recessions.) In this paper, we investigate whether there is additional information...

Nearly all journal rankings in economics use some weighted average of citations to calculate a journal's impact. These rankings are often used, formally or informally, to help assess the publication success of individual economists or institutions. Although ranking methods and opinions are...

The national economy is often described as having a business cycle over which aggregate output enters and exits distinct expansion and recession phases. Analogously, national employment cycles in and out of its own expansion and contraction phases, which are closely related to the business...

This paper estimates the dynamics of the personal-bankruptcy rate over the business cycle by exploiting large cross-state variation in recessions and bankruptcies. We find that bankruptcy rates are significantly higher than normal during a recession and rise as a recession persists. After a...

The burdens of a recession are not spread evenly across demographic groups. The public and media, for example, noticed that, from the start of the current recession in December 2007 through June 2009, men accounted for more than three quarters of net job losses. Other differences have garnered...

We present a general equilibrium analysis of biofuel subsidies in an open-economy context. In the small-country case, when a Pigouvian tax on conventional fuels such as crude is in place, the optimal biofuel subsidy is zero. When the tax on crude is not available as a policy option, however, a...

Ethnic networks?as proxies for information networks?have been associated with higher levels of international trade. Previous research has not differentiated between the roles of these networks on the extensive and intensive margins. The present paper does so using a model with fixed effects,...

There is a well-established literature finding that the Canada-U.S. border has a large dampening effect on trade, is asymmetric, and differs across provinces. In this paper, I demonstrate that the standard gravity model used to obtain these results provides biased estimates of the volume of...

This paper compares various specifications of the gravity model of trade as nested versions of a general specification that uses bilateral country-pair fixed effects to control for heterogeneity. For each specification, we show that the a theoretical restrictions to obtain them from the general...