A growing number of studies investigate the determinants of happiness, or subjective well-being. Few, however, specifically examine the financial aspects of subjective well-being. This study estimates the determinants of subjective financial wellbeing (SWB) for a city in the American Southwest....

The paper demonstrates through a number of Monte-Carlo experiments that, for the type of cross-section data sets typically encountered in applied economics, Chow tests on sorted variations of the data matrix can detect neglected parameter heterogeneity. The paper focuses on heterogeneity in the...

This paper extends empirical research on marital instability in two dimensions. First, I examine the effects of household income volatility on divorce. Second, I examine the effects of household income volatility on the divorce behavior of lower- and higher household income individuals. The...

The passage of the Interstate Banking and Branch Efficiency Act (IBBEA) of 1994 streamlined the consolidation process that had been underway since the formation of the first regional compact in 1982. This study shows that in the IBBEA’s aftermath, bank holding companies streamlined operation...

This paper extends empirical research on determinants of divorce in two ways. First, I examine the effect of inflation on divorce. Second, the use of a structural time-series modeling approach attributes unobservables and omitted variables to an unobserved component, which allows for the...

Today, many pregnant women take a brief period of time off from work to give birth. In this paper, I identify the effects of pregnancy employment on health at birth. My initial results show that pregnancy employment has beneficial effects. However, these effects often become statistically...

We evaluate the impact of the unilateral trade policy concession known as African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) on U.S. imports from eligible Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Using U.S.-SSA countries’ trade data that span the years 1991-2006, we find that AGOA has contributed to the...

The second in a series of quarterly reports on the housing market in Tennessee, supported by a Tennessee Housing Development Agency grant