Given the slow growth of labor productivity in recent years, some have argued that the boost from information technology may have run its course.� Our analysis points to a less pessimistic conclusion.� While projections of economic developments are always difficult, our judgment is that "No,...

In a financial intermediary, risk managers can expend effort to reduce loan probability of default and loss given default, but effort is unobservable. Incentive compensation (IC) can induce manager effort. When deposit insurance is subsidized, the demand for risk management declines. Regulatory...

The instability of labor earnings in the United States contributes to earnings inequality and may diminish household welfare. Despite the importance of earnings instability little is known about its correlates or causes. This paper seeks to better understand earnings instability by studying...

Broadband is treated differently from other IT industries when it comes to competition policy: competition in the rest of the IT sector is subject to scrutiny under antitrust laws, while broadband is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. But there is no basis for this asymmetric...

New bank regulations include macroprudential policies to control bank loan growth. We find bank funding costs and supervisory monitoring intensity to be the most important determinants of loan growth followed by loan portfolio performance and bank profitability. Bank capital and liquidity ratios...

An emerging literature proposes using conditional value at risk and marginal expected shortfall to measure financial institution systemic risk. We identify two weaknesses in this literature: (1) it lacks formal statistical hypothesis tests; and, (2) it confounds systemic and systematic risk. We...

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences?

Can access to regulators provide operational benefits to firms?

Free trade zones possess many attributes of capitalist economies and can attract foreign companies, foreign investment in domestic companies, industrial production, and wealth generation. However, such zones are also troubling; they can produce several negative results including a strong mafia...

�This study analyzes public sector salaries and benefits in Wisconsin, with a particular focus on disentangling the risk-adjusted value of pension benefits offered in the public sector from accounting conventions that can understate the cost and value of defined benefit pension plans.