Evidence of relationships between religious affiliation and the African AIDS pandemic is found in the medical, religion, and sociology literatures. In particular, studies have shown that predominantly Christian countries tend to have higher HIV rates than predominantly Muslim countries. These...

I incorporate an insight of Friedrich Hayek - that competition allows a thousand flowers to bloom, and discovers the best among them - into a model of Schumpeterian innovation. Firms face uncertainty about the optimal direction of innovation, so more innovations implies a higher expected value...

We develop evidence of bettors with sentiment bias in the betting market on National Basketball Association (NBA) games. We use novel measures of team popularity, arena capacity-utilization and team all star votes received, as proxies for the presence of biased investors. Analysis of point...

This paper develops an indicator of Internet awareness of corruption as described in Goel et al. (2012) to see how this impacts both corruption perceptions and corruption experience. The results confirm the finding of Goel et al. (2012) that corruption perceptions are highly influenced by...

We propose nonparametric estimators for conditional value-at-risk (VaR) and expected shortfall (ES) associated with conditional distributions of a series of returns on a financial asset. The return series and the conditioning covariates, which may include lagged returns and other exogenous...

Previous research using attendance-based proxies for the number of investors with sentiment bias supported the presence of investor sentiment in sports betting markets. We use data from social media (Facebook \Likes") to proxy for participants with investor sentiment and analyze variation in...

This paper attempts to outline and summarize the main body of work on one strand of James Buchanan's work, constitutional political economy. The grounding ideas and inferences of Buchanan's approach can be summarized as follows: (a) The appropriate method for analyzing and understanding social...

We estimate the effect of increasing the supply of housing vouchers on rents using a panel of housing units in the American Housing Survey. We do not find that an increase in vouchers affected the overall price of rental housing, but do estimate differences in effects based on an individual...

We show that an otherwise standard one-sector real business cycle model with variable capital utilization and mild increasing returns-to-scale is able to generate qualitatively as well as quantitatively realistic aggregate fluctuations driven by news shocks to future consumption demand. In sharp...

This paper replicates and analyses a study by Hoover and Pecorino (2005) on federal spending in US states. H&P followed on path-breaking research by Atlas et al. (1995) in which evidence was claimed in favour of the "small state effect;" namely, that since every state is represented by two...