The United States and the countries comprising the European Union have dominated the global economy during the past seventy years. However, momentous change is underway. China will soon be the largest economy in the world, and other countries of the developing world are rapidly increasing in...

In recent years, the number of downgrades in corporate bond ratings has exceeded the number or upgrades. This fact has led some to conclude that the credit quality of US corporate debt has declined. However, declining credit quality is not the only possible explanation.

This paper investigates the factors explaining significant policy change by studying how bipartisan support developed to sustain the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) of 1934.

The severity of the Great Depression was due to the loss of confidence engendered by the collapse of the banking system in Winter 1933. Dissatisfaction with Federal Reserve actions led President Hoover and the Congress in January 1932 to create the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that was...

We analyze Senate roll-call votes concerning tariffs on specific goods in order to understand the economic and political factors influencing the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

Despite the widespread view from Berle and Means (1932) onward that ownership of firms in increasingly separated from managerial control of those firms, almost no time series research exists to address this issue. Using the earliest available source on ownership for a large cross-section of US...

For many years, California required that most women receive overtime premium of time and a half for hours of wrok beyond 8 in a given day. In 1980, this daily overtime penalty was entended to men as well. This situation provides a unique opportunity to estimate the impact of an exogenous...

Atlanta's rail rapid transit system (MARTA), which began operations in 1979 and has cost U.S. taxpayers and residents of the Atlanta metropolitan area more than $3.5 billion (1990s), has been identified by advocates of new rail systems in other U.S. cities as one of the most successful rail...

We study the transmission of monetary policy from the United States to Canada under flexible exchange rates. Our results suggest that flexible exchange rates insulate a country from foreign monetary disturbances. We find that the direct effect of a monetary contraction in the U.S. is a small...