We examine the impact of government transfers and the business cycle on poverty in the United States in the context of a poverty function that includes the official poverty rate, three types of government transfers, real wages, the number of female-headed families, and a business cycle variable....

This article examines the long-term impact of government transfers on poverty in the United States using cointegration techniques. In contrast to most existing studies, we find that government transfers play an important poverty-reducing role.

The elasticity of substitution between capital and labor and, in turn, the direction of technical change are critical parameters in many fields of economics. Until recently, though, the application of production functions with non-unitary substitution elasticities (i.e., non Cobb Douglas) was...

This major Handbook provides country studies of the latest developments in financial reform in a selection of both developed and developing countries from Western Europe, North America, South America, Asia and Australia, written by acknowledged experts in their fields. The outcome is an...

We study the effects of monetary policy on the choice of production technology and specialization. The level of output specialization is represented by the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor within a CES production function. A higher degree of specialization increases trading...

This paper presents a consistent explanation for biases in the direction of technical change in agriculture. The emergence of such biases had been pointed out by Hayami and Ruttan (1970) based on a study of long time series of agricultural inputs and technologies in Japan and in the US from 1880...

The influence of political developments on the evolution of economic thought is the main theme behind this book. As the authors reveal throughout the book, history has shown many times that political events can trigger the formulation of new economic conceptions that in turn influence the future...

Using a normalized CES function with factor-augmenting technical progress, we estimate a supply-side system of the U.S. economy from 1953 to 1998. Avoiding potential estimation biases that may have occurred in earlier studies and putting a high emphasis on data consistency, we obtain robust...