Over the U.S. business cycle, fluctuations in residential investment are well known to systematically lead GDP. These dynamics are documented here to be specific to the U.S. and Canada. In other developed economies residential investment is broadly coincident with GDP. Nonresidential investment...

The Mortensen-Pissarides model with unemployment benefits and taxes has been able to account for the variation in unemployment rates across countries but does not explain why geographical mobility is very low in some countries (on average, three times lower in Europe than in the U.S.). We build...

We document empirical life cycle profiles of wages, earnings, and hours of work for pay from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, following the same workers for up to four decades along the intensive margin of labor supply. For six of the eight cohorts we analyze the wage profile does not decline...

A search model of the labor market is augmented to include commuting time to work. The theory posits that wages are positively related to commute distance, by a factor itself depending negatively on the bargaining power of workers. Since not all combinations of distance and wages are accepted,...

Using multiple datasets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing...

Fake antivirus (AV) programs have been utilized to defraud millions ofcomputer users into paying as much as one hundred dollars for a phony softwarelicense. As a result, fake AV software has evolved into one of the most lucrativecriminal operations on the Internet. In this paper, we examine the...

In 1961, the average full-time student at a 4-year college in the U.S. studied about 24 hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only 14 hours a week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study times occurred for...

Several articles find no support for the law of one price (LOP) in commodity markets. Only a few articles find some support. A rejection of the LOP would strike at the heart of economic theory. A rejection would suggest that firms do not maximize wealth and households do not maximize utility....