The economic costs of environmental regulations have been widely debated since the U.S. began to restrict pollution emissions more than four decades ago. Using detailed production data from nearly 1.2 million plant observations drawn from the 1972-1993 Annual Survey of Manufactures, we estimate...

Preferences for transport activities are often considered only in terms of time and money. Whilst congestion in automobile traffic increases costs by raising trip durations, the same is less obvious in public transport (PT), especially rail-based. This has lead many economic analyses to conclude...

Can government spending have a large effect on private consumption and income? This paper uses a novel dataset on federal government disaster-relief spending, combined with both household and state-level consumption, income and employment data, to answer this question. My estimates show that the...

Aggregate bank-loan data reported by the FDIC show that bank lending to small businesses plummeted during 2009-2011 following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in Sep. 2008 and the onset of the financial crisis, and continued to decline during the post-crisis years 2012-2015. However, the number...

We analyze changes in lending by U.S. banks to businesses during 1994 – 2011. We find thatlending to businesses and, in particular, to small businesses, declined precipitously followingonset of the financial crisis. We also examine the relative changes in business lending by banksthat did, and...

The paper takes the Leibnitz Integral Rule (LIR) under variable integration limits and demonstrates how it can be applied to a business firm's dynamic problem of determining its optimum level of investment activity, when the longevity (life span) of the investment is itself a variable determined...

The US Government is the largest purchaser of goods and services in the WORLD spending over $400 Billion annually. This figure does not take into consideration the 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act/Stimulus Funding. The government purchases everything from products to services...

This paper examines the effect of firms' lobbying activities on US federal grants. For an average firm in terms of grant amount and lobbying expenditures, my model indicates that one additional dollar in lobbying to the granting agency yields to a minimum increase in the federal grant of 3.54...