We estimate the long-term impact of social security and social protection spending in a set of twelve EU countries. We estimate country-specific VARs relating GDP, unemployment, savings, and social spending. We find that social spending has a negative effect in most countries while the effects...

In 1998, a number of polluting industries, including fossil fuel power plants, were added to the list of firms publicly reporting pollution releases in the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). This caused a large increase in reported toxic pollution, and a corresponding decrease in median housing...

Computable general equilibrium (CGE) and bottom-up models each have unique strengths and weakness in evaluating energy and climate policies. This paper describes the development of an integrated technological, economic modelling platform (HYBTEP), built through the soft-link between the bottomup...

This paper provides new empirical evidence about how workers’ locations affect inequality in earnings and costs of living. I find that young college graduates grow up and choose to live in locations that have smaller effects on their own wages and higher costs of living, relative to locations...

We use data from the National Incidence-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to examine how the probability of getting caught when committing a crime, proxied by ambient daylight, impacts criminal activity. We exploit the existence of daylight saving time (DST) to provide within-hour exogenous shockto...

The goal of this paper is to examine the timing of environmental compliance inspections and determine the extent to which such inspections can be predicted. The paper focuses on modeling the inspections at hazardous waste facilities in the U.S. using detailed data on individual inspections and...

We use the NLS-72 and ELS:2002 data sets to evaluate changes in the college matching process. Rising attendance rates at four-year institutions have not decreased average preparedness of college goers or of college graduates, and further attendance gains are possible before diminishing returns...

This paper describes the theoretical underpinnings and provides empirical evidence for a model that predicts a positive impact of immigration on entrepreneurial activity. Immigrants, we hypothesize, facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship by being willing and able to invest in new skills. At...

Recent events have resulted in calls to ban large capacity magazines (LCMs) holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition. Using data from a Virginia data base of crime guns seized by police between 1993 and 2013, we find that the proportion of crime guns with LCMs declined after the 1994 Federal...

During the 1990s, the state of Ohio contracted out Workers’ Compensation (WC) case management, incorporating a large bonus payment intended to reward reduced claim duration. The bonus is essentially a decreasing function of average days away from work, excluding claims longer than 15 months....