The low and stable inflation that the Fed has relentlessly pursued over the past decade or so has buoyed virtually all demographic groups, enabling most Americans to do a lot more than just keep their heads above water.

There is a great deal of variation in the levels of entrepreneurship, or rates of self-employment, across the regions of Britain. Over the period 1983-1995, average self-employment in the North, Scotland, and the West Midlands was respectively 25%, 15%, and 15% lower than the national average,...

This paper compares various specifications of the gravity model of trade as nested versions of a general specification that uses bilateral country-pair fixed effects to control for heterogeneity. For each specification, we show that the atheoretical restrictions used to obtain them from the...

Estimates of the natural rate of unemployment are important in many macroeconomic models used by economists and policy advisors. This paper shows how such estimates might benefit from closer attention to regional developments. Regional business cycles do not move in lockstep, and greater...

This paper uses a Markov-switching model with structural breaks to characterize and compare regional business cycles in Japan for the period 1976-2005. An early-1990s structural break meant a reduction in national and regional growth rates in expansion and recession, usually resulting in an...

This paper uses a panel approach to examine the effect that the government-policy environment has on the level of entrepreneurship. Specifically, the authors investigate whether marginal income tax rates and bankruptcy exemptions influence rates of entrepreneurship. Whereas previous work in the...

Many economists expend a lot of energy decrying trade protectionism; nonetheless, their estimates of the actual burden that protectionism imposes on the economy have been surprisingly small. In this article, Howard J. Wall presents a method that captures some of the effects and distortions of...

The authors estimate the responsiveness of aid to recipient countries' economic and physical needs, civil/political rights, and government effectiveness. They look exclusively at the post-Cold War era and use fixed effects to control for the political, strategic, and other considerations of...

Debates over the desirability of a preferential trading area frequently begin with the supposition that it will have two effects on the volume of trade: It will increase trade between members of the trading area and decrease trade between members and nonmembers. This paper demonstrates, however,...