This working paper finds no evidence that the SBA loan guarantees serve any focused or rigorously defined public policy purpose at all.

Despite the frequency of tax changes and their potential importance to investors, there has been relatively little modeling of anticipated tax changes.

The instability of labor earnings in the United States contributes to earnings inequality and may diminish household welfare. Despite the importance of earnings instability little is known about its correlates or causes. This paper seeks to better understand earnings instability by studying...

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences?

In a financial intermediary, risk managers can expend effort to reduce loan probability of default and loss given default, but effort is unobservable. Incentive compensation (IC) can induce manager effort. When deposit insurance is subsidized, the demand for risk management declines. Regulatory...

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.

We describe the broad range of uncertainties faced by the developers of medical technologies. Empirically, we estimate the asset market incidence of the realization  of two such of uncertainties experienced by the biotechnology firm Myriad Genetics, Inc.

In this paper, the authors document the complex issues facing the FDA in assessing the quality of generic drugs. They conclude that increased transparency as well as the updating of FDA bioequivalence standards may be important to overcome some of these challenges.

This paper ranks all 50 states according to how costly their public-employee compensation packages are relative to private-sector standards.

One critical economic question surrounding cap-and-trade is how to distribute the permits.