The objective of this paper is to explore various relationships between self-reported life satisfaction and state public finance in the U.S. The paper focuses on both government expenditure and revenue (especially tax) structures. This paper is the first of its kind to examine the relationship...

We compare the size, structure and evolution of the public sectors in Canada and the United States primarily using national income accounting data. In the course of this investigation, which is accompanied by a substantial spreadsheet covering the period from 1929 to 2003/2004, questions are...

The U.S. government has recently moved toward privatizing military services, most noticeably in Iraq, where profit-seeking contractors frequently engage in combat against insurgents. Many observers are shocked and disturbed by these developments, since they violate the governmental monopoly on...

Energy use is intertwined with environmental harms, climate, and economic development. However, the United States has failed to balance these interests together to make effective policy that can address each of these issues. The need for such integrative policy has become more and more obvious...

Due to Federal regulations, automobile air bag availability was a model-specific discontinuous function of model year for used vehicles in the 1990s and early 2000s. We use these discontinuities and the gradual increase in the supply of air bags to trace out the demand curve for air bags and the...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Trustworthy eco-labels provide consumers with valuable information on environmentally friendly products and thus promote green consumerism. But what makes an eco-label trustworthy and what can government do to increase consumer confidence? The scant existing literature indicates that low...

We present a hedonic framework to estimate U.S. households' preferences over local climates, using detailed weather and 2000 Census data. We find that Americans favor an average daily temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit, will pay more on the margin to avoid excess heat than cold, and are not...

This paper tests the hypothesis that a nation's hosting of a mega-sporting event is an experience good for its residents. Applying data from an ex-ante and ex-post query based on contingent valuation methods, we use the Soccer World Cup 2006 as a natural experiment. The significant ex-post...

Rising inequality in the United States has raised concerns about potentially widening gaps in educational achievement by socio-economic status (SES). Using assessments from LTT-NAEP, Main-NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA that are psychometrically linked over time, we trace trends in achievement for U.S....