The emphasis of this paper is on the political economy of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States and how the policy makers contributed to it through their legislation and regulations, made under the rising influence of interest groups and the lobbying activities of the finance...

Cold treatment periods, and associated levels of quarantine security, that maximize net US welfare under USDA's current medfly detection and control program are examined using a deterministic bioeconomic optimization model. As anticipated, the efficient level of quarantine security is shown to...

I relate hours worked with taxes on consumption and labor. I propose a model and compare its predictions for Portugal, France, Spain, United Kingdom and United States. Hours per worker in Portugal decreased from 35.1 in 1986 to 32.6 in 2001. With only the parameters and the taxes for Portugal,...

This article reviews recent US proposals to amend the US Controlled Foreign Corporation (CFC) rules, also known as Subpart F. It places the US debate in a comparative perspective by describing how the US proposals fit in with developments in other countries that have CFC rules

The survey based monthly US ISM production index and Eurozone manufacturing PMI output index provide early information on industrial output growth before the release of the official industrial production index. I use the Carlson and Parkin probability method to construct monthly growth estimates...

The global financial crisis has led regulators and legislators in the United States and in the European Union to introduce a number of rules and regulations aimed at addressing market failures and improving regulatory enforcement in the banking and finance industry. The increasing convergence...

Using recent results in the measurement error literature, we show that the official U.S. unemployment rates substantially underestimate the true levels of unemployment, due to misclassification errors in labor force status in Current Population Surveys. Our closed-form identification of the...

We show how to construct a ranking of U.S. undergraduate programs based on students' revealed preferences. We construct examples of national and regional rankings, using hand-collected data on 3,240 high- achieving students. Our statistical model extends models used for ranking players in...

In this paper, we investigate whether U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) with strong and independent risk management functions have lower enterprise-wide risk. We hand-collect information on the organizational structure of the risk management function at the 74 largest publicly-listed BHCs, and...