I apply the Beveridge-Nelson business cycle decomposition method to the time series of murder in the United States (1900-2004). Separating out permanent from cyclical murder, I hypothesize that the cyclical part coincides with documented waves of organized crime, internal tensions, breakdowns in...

The main aim of this paper is to analyze US-China trade relations and the so-called "trade war" between the two countries. As a first step, we will look at the trade relations between the two countries and explain why President Trump is eagerly following a protectionist trade policy toward China...

The year 2009 is a propitious time to evaluate systems of investor protection in financial markets as global bank losses exceed the 1 trillion mark and market losses equally exceed the 1 trillion mark. Prior to the Global Financial Crisis, the European Union enacted sweeping legislation to...

The growing interdependency among East Asian countries means that there is concern not only on the way their macroeconomic variables are linked across borders, but also on the way shocks are transmitted as a consequence. This paper investigates the effect of macroeconomic linkages on...

Draft lottery number assignment during the Vietnam era provides a natural experiment to examine the effects of military service on crime. Using exact dates of birth for inmates in state and federal prisons in 1979, 1986, and 1991, we find robust evidence of effects on violent crimes among...

It is a common assumption that regions within the same country converge to approximately the same steady-state income levels. The so-called absolute convergence hypothesis focuses on initial income levels to account for the variability in income growth among regions. Empirical data seem to...

In this paper, we study the growth rates of 4-digit sectors in U.S. manufacturing. Two measures of size (value of shipments, value added) are considered, for each of the 38 years (1959-1996) of a sample of 458 4-digit sectors, drawn from the NBER Manufacturing Productivity database. Whole sample...

We use U.S. county-level data to estimate convergence rates for 22 individual states. We find significant heterogeneity. E.g., the California estimate is 19.9 percent and the New York estimate is 3.3 percent. Convergence rates are essentially uncorrelated with income levels.