This paper examines tax return-generated data on the labor force behavior of people before and after they receive inheritances. The results are consistent with Andrew Carnegie's century-old assertion that large inheritances decrease a person's labor force participation. For example, a single...

It has been known for a long time that inventory fluctuations are of great importance in business cycles. But inventory fluctuations are fundamentally a short-period phenomenon. Consequently, annual data may shed relatively little light on the nature of inventory fluctuations; most of the...

While most Americans have long favored a balanced federal budget , not all do. This paper uses cross-sectional differences among respondents to two public opinion polls to try to discriminate among competing hypotheses about why Americans want the budget balanced. Logit models are fit to data...

Using a simulation model crafted to integrate the short-run and long-term impacts of tax" reform on the housing market, we find modest impacts from fundamental reform of the Federal" income tax. These results suggest that concerns over the impact of tax reform on housing values" and household...

Recent proposals assume that endowing the U.S. President with a line item veto will reduce spending. Analysis of a rich set of state budget data indicates that long run budgets are not altered by an item veto. In the short run, the item veto's potency is contingent upon the political setting....

Researchers, commentators, and politicians have devoted steadily more attention to infrastructure in response to claims that inadequate accumulation of public capital has contributed to substandard U.S. economic growth. Despite this, the link between infrastructure and productivity growth...

Some commentators have suggested that the absence of portable health insurance impedes people from leaving their jobs to start new firms. We investigate this belief by comparing wage-earners who become self-employed during a given period of time with their counterparts who do not. By examining...

Worldwide, dependency ratios are forecast to increase dramatically in the next 50 years. A great deal of attention has been devoted to understanding the changes in fiscal policies that must' take place to accommodate these changes. In contrast, less effort has been concentrated on studying the...

This paper considers estimation and testing of vector autoregression coefficients in panel data, and applies the techniques to analyze the dynamic properties of revenues, expenditures, and grants in a sample of United States municipalities. The model allows for nonstationary individual effects,...

The authors specify a model of municipal labor demand when resource flows available to the municipality are uncertain. The model allows them to test the hypothesis that employment decisions are rational in the sense that they incorporate all available information at the time that the decisions...