This study finds that NAFTA has increased U.S. merchandise exports to Mexico and Canada by just over 15 percent, and has increased total U.S. merchandise exports by nearly 8 percent. We also find that although many states have seen large increases in exports to both Mexico and Canada, others...

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,...

Debates over the desirability a preferential trading area (PTA) begin with the supposition that it will have two effects on the volume of trade: it will increase trade between PTA members, and decrease trade between members and non-members. This paper demonstrates, however, that at the regional...

This paper demonstrates that recent results suggesting a positive relationship between banking deregulation and entrepreneurship are very sensitive to estimation assumptions. When heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation are corrected for, branching deregulation is shown to have no effect and the...

The U.S. aggregate business cycle is often characterized as a series of distinct recession and expansion phases. We apply a regime-switching model to state-level coincident indexes and conclude that state business cycles also can be characterized in this way. We find also that states differ a...

Using a monetary VAR, we show how the depths and lengths of recessions generated by contractionary monetary policy differ a great deal across U.S. regions. Our results indicate that the Great Lakes and the Far West experience the largest output losses during a monetary-policy-induced recession,...

This paper demonstrates that levels of entrepreneurship can be greatly affected by the general policy environment. Using a state-level panel, we estimate the effects of several policy variables on rates of entrepreneurship and find that bankruptcy exemptions, corporate tax rates, and the level...

This paper reconsiders recent empirical evidence found by Andrew Rose that countries adopting a common currency will triple their bilateral trade. We find that this large estimated effect is due to estimation bias arising from missing and/or misspecified time-invariant factors, rather than to...

Despite the ongoing worldwide trend toward regional integration, Japan has remained outside of all regional trading agreements. Because more than 60 percent of Japan's trade is with countries that are members of a major regional bloc, this reluctance may have had significant effects on its...

This paper examines the spatial interaction of neighboring cities over their employment cycles. The cycles of neighboring cities tend to be more similar to one another than are those of non-neighboring cities, although this is due primarily to neighbors' tendency to be in the same state. In...