This paper suggests that area studies and economics have a better chance to be married successfully if we shift our attention from the exclusive emphasis on economic growth towards improvements in human development, especially the much broadened version of that concept. Different areas are shown...

Economy: Comparing California before and after the 1970 passage of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and benchmarking against performance in the other 49 states, this study finds that 1) California per capita GDP, 2) California housing relative to population, 3) California...

This study examines events within African American history of the United States. It explains how traumatic events in the history of African Americans in the United States have affected the decisions they make today, which directly affects the national and kitchen table economies. This study is...

How do you build the next Silicon Valley? This paper offers an empirical examination of the factors that help foster internet firms and employment. It builds off literature examining factors related to the economic potential of places. We examine the internet industry using the identification...

In August 2022, the US Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a comprehensive piece of legislation aiming to stimulate the US economy and to increase its resilience. At an estimated 430 billion euros, it is a massive government investment and spending program in the welfare state,...

We estimate spillovers from public funding for health research in the context of the NIH's Fogarty International Center's AIDS International Training and Research Program, which aims to strengthen scientific capacity in AIDS endemic countries by providing African researchers with training...

Although food aid may have important medium-to-long term effects, there is a glaring absence of empirical research on food aid dynamics. This paper applies vector autoregression methods to data from 18 countries over the period 1961-95. We find evidence that food aid has a pronounced J-curve...