This paper assesses the impact of adopting a post-grant review institution in the US patent system by comparing the 'opposition careers' of European Patent Office (EPO) equivalents of litigated US patents to those of a control group of EPO patents. We demonstrate several novel methods of...

With restricted-use data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I conduct an analysis of the macro- and micro-economic determinants of marrying. Based on observations across a broad segment of calendar years (from 1978 to 2010), I examine the measures of the national unemployment rate for males, national...

We formulate a model to explain why the lack of political competition may stifle economic performance and use the United States as a testing ground for the model’s predictions, exploiting the 1965 Voting Rights Act which helped break the near monpoly on political power of the Democrats in...

Aiming to further explore possible underlying causes for the recent stagnation in American heights, this paper describes the result of analysis of the commercial U.S. Sizing Survey. Using zip codes available in the data set, we consider geographic correlates of height such as local poverty rate,...

This study analyses the physical stature of runaway apprentices and military deserters based on advertisements collected from 18th-century newspapers, in order to explore the biological welfare of colonial and early-national Americans. The results indicate that heights declined somewhat at...

This paper is the first to analyze the impact of family background on permanent earnings based on sibling correlations in Germany and to provide a cross-country comparison of Germany, Denmark, and USA. The main findings are that family and community background has a stronger influence on...

This paper examines the determinants of voluntary individual carbon offsetting, i.e. the financial compensation of emissions from energy use. In contrast to former studies in this field, we particularly consider a comprehensive set of factors that are discussed in the context of voluntary...

How much have the dynamics of US time series and in the particular the transmission of innovations to monetary policy instruments changed over the last century? The answers to these questions that this paper gives are "A lot." and "Probably less than you think.", respectively. We use vector...

The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...