We use hurricane Katrina's damage to the Mississippi coast in 2005 as a natural experiment to study business survival in the aftermath of a capital-destruction shock. We find very high exit rates for businesses that incurred physical damage, particularly for small firms and less-productive...

Economists' policy advice is based on models of responses by a variety of economic entities to policy adoptions. There is compelling evidence that these entities do not optimize in at all the fashion that mainstream economics assumes. Rather, they limit decision-making to solving problems of...

This paper studies monetary and macro-prudential policies in a simple model with both a nominal rigidity and a financial friction that give rise to price and financial stability objectives. We find that lowering the degree of nominal rigidity or increasing the strength of the interest rate...

This article reviews the literature on teacher value-added. Although value-added models have been used to measure the contributions of numerous inputs to educational production, their application toward identifying the contributions of individual teachers has been particularly contentious. Our...

Laboratory experiments employing an induced-values methodology often report on allocative efficiencies observed. That methodology requires experimenters know subjects' motivations, questionable in laboratory experiments, impossible in field experiments. Allocative efficiency implies a...

We consider a cointegrating regression in which the integrated regressors are messy in the sense that they contain data that may be mismeasured, missing, observed at mixed frequencies, or have other irregularities that cause the econometrician to observe them with mildly nonstationary noise....

Standard target zone exchange rate models are based on nonlinear functions of an unobserved economic fundamental, which is assumed to be bounded, similarly to the target zone exchange rates themselves. A violation of this key assumption is a basic structural reason for model failure. Using a...

Recent studies have found that two state-level measures of social capital, average levels of civic participation and trust, are associated with improvements in individual health status. In this study we employ these measures, together with the Putnam (2000) index, to examine several key aspects...

Wal-Mart is the largest company in the world, yet little is known about its economic impact. This essay discusses what is known about Wal-Mart's competitive advantage and its economic impact on local communities, as well as the national and global economy, and highlights the open questions to be...

This paper examines whether educational production in secondary school involves joint production among teachers across subjects. In doing so, it also provides insights into the reliability of value-added modeling. Teacher value- added to reading test scores is estimated for four different...