Previous studies have shown that adolescent religious participation is negatively associated with risky health behaviors like cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and illicit drug use. One explanation for these findings is that religion directly reduces risky behaviors because churches...

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....

The objective of this paper is to investigate the economic and fiscal impact of road infrastructure investment in Portugal, focusing on the effects for each administrative region of both local investments and investments in other regions. We estimate VAR models for the national economy as well...

This paper describes a classroom game that illustrates the effects of asymmetric information and adverse selection in health insurance markets. The first part of this game simulates a market in which buyers can purchase insurance from sellers; in some periods, government regulation of the...

The paradox of EthiopiaÕs agrarian economy is that, despite underwriting a world civilization, the transition to an industrial economy has eluded it. Using a model of AfroAsiatic tributarism, we attribute this outcome to endemic extractive contests between a predominantly landed peasantry and a...

The U.S. military has been criticized for its failure to stop the Iraqi insurgency’s use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have caused most of the Coalition casualties. We use an instrumental variables approach to estimate the insurgent responses to U.S. military countermeasures....

This paper presents new evidence on the conflict between two competing explanations of the increase in college costs, the cost disease theory of William Baumol and William Bowen and the revenue theory of cost of Howard Bowen. Using cross section data, the paper demonstrates that the cost disease...

While the demise of many tightly-managed exchange rate regimes has meant that exchange rate volatility has risen for most developing countries in the past few decades, there exists little consensus on the ramifications of that volatility for real sectoral performance. Using production and export...

Voting in an election in which elimination of the local car tax is the central issue shows how a highly visible universal tax cut can prevail in the electoral process even if benefits are skewed toward upper income households. These results are consistent with positive models of fiscal structure...

The diversified business group (DBG) is a ubiquitous institution in developing economies. It is a formal inter-firm network that typically involves financial institutions, distributors and manufacturers. Groupwise diversification is viewed by some as a novel form of organizational innovation by...