This paper analyzes the persistence of the shock caused by the American Civil War on the relative city size distribution of the United States. Our fi ndings suggest that the effects of this shock were permanent, which sharply contrasts with previous results regarding World War II for Japanese...

This paper applies the panel unit root test proposed by Im, Pesaran and Shin (1997) to test for unemployment hysteresis in the US states and the EU countries against the alternative of a natural rate. The results show that hysteresis for the EU and the natural rate for the US states are the most...

Central banks actively engage in sterilized foreign exchange market intervention despite numerous empirical studies indicating that these operations do not systematically affect the exchange rate. Are these policies misguided and central bankers irrational? Or is evidence showing the...

When examined for the period 1985-1992 as a whole, the impact of changes in the targeted Fed funds rate on U.S. treasury bill rates has been weaker than during previous periods. The period, however, should be viewed as three separate regimes. First, I show significant differences between the...

This paper aims to shed light on the importance of health considerations for business cycle fluctuations and the effect of health status on labor productivity and availability of labor input for productive use. To this end, Grossman's (2000) partial-equilibrium framework with endogenous health...

The goals of income transfer systems in the US and the UK for low-income families are to reduce poverty and welfare dependency and encourage work. Both the US and UK have made in-work benefits a key part of their strategy through the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Working Families' Tax...

We consider the estimation of Cobb-Douglas production functions using panel data covering a large sample of companies observed for a small number of time periods. Standard GMM estimators, which eliminate unobserved firm-specific e¤ects by taking first differences, have been found to produce...

Modern consumer theories are built upon the premise of the forward looking behavior of households. While most of the empirical studies at micro level are based on Euler equation, there have been few to estimate the household consumption function and test the implication of forward looking...

Cross-country studies have found a negative relationship between income inequality and economic growth. The main problem with the cross-country analyses is the poor quality of the data on income distribution. This paper tests the robustness of the cross-country results to the use of a more...

Over the past years a large number of regional growth theories have been developed and a number of models have been built in an effort to describe, explain and eventually predict regional development trends. However, until a few years ago, the large majority of those models assumed the existence...