We use disaster impact data over time to examine the degree to which the human and economic losses from natural disasters are reduced as economies develop. We find that countries with higher income, higher educational attainment, greater openness, more complete financial systems and smaller...

In this paper data from all 50 U.S. states are used to examine factors associated with the level of educational attainment in the population. Specifically, this inquiry examines the relationship between the percentage of the adult population aged 25-39 with a college bachelors degree or more and...

In this paper we present new evidence of cross-border shopping in response to sales taxation. While several instructive studies provide estimates of the cross-border shopping effect, we utilize a unique opportunity to evaluate the effect of a large discrete change in sales tax policy. Using...

Theoretic growth models and microeconomic evidence suggest that human capital accumulation is an important determinant of per capita income growth. However, outliers, measurement errors, and incorrect specifications may have affected early macroeconomic studies that found a weak relationship...

In this paper we use monthly gasoline price data for all fifty U.S. states over the period 1984 to 1999 to examine the incidence of state gasoline excise taxes. Standard economic theory predicts full shifting of the excise tax to consumers when the supply of gasoline is perfectly elastic, and...

In this paper we examine the impact of the lottery sales and the introduction of new lottery games on the retail activity using panel data on lottery sales, the adoption of new lottery games in West Virginia and in neighboring states, and retail income (a proxy for retail sales) for all 55...

We conduct Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the effects of outlier observations on the properties of linearity tests against threshold autoregressive (TAR) processes. By considering different specifications and levels of persistence of the data generating processes, we find that outliers...

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) of 2005 guarantees adult members of rural households to a minimum of 100 days of employment with certain provisions geared specically towards women. The phase wise rollout of the program allows us to employ a...

Since the start of the Eurozone, the pattern of debt ows to Peripheral Europe seems puzzling: they were mostly indirect and intermediated by the large countries of the euro area. This paper examines the euro currency risk and the business cycle risk as two opposing forces: while the currency...

This paper studies the cyclicality of portfolio flows under the presence of productivity growth rate shocks. Productivity growth rate shocks successfully replicate countercyclical net equity outflows and procyclical bond inflows for advanced countries, which couldn't be captured in a model with...