The two global international financial institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, frequently, and often repeatedly, extend loans to developing nations. Recently, these loans have been blamed for generating adverse economic outcomes. An empirical growth model, which...

The relationship between government size and the unemployment rate is investigated using an error-correction model that describes both the short-run dynamics and long-run determination of the unemployment rate. Using data from twenty OECD countries from 1970 to 1999 and after correcting for...

Twenty states and several cities have adopted their own EITC programs, typically piggy-backing on the federal EITC by offering benefits equal to some designated proportion of the federal benefits. In all but four states, the state EITC is fully refundable, just like the Federal EITC. Using the...

In his seminal work, Stigler (1961) argued that price dispersion for a homogeneous product is an indication of consumer ignorance. Ready access to price information on the Internet has led to many claims that ignorance will not persist in online markets, and that online prices for a homogenous...

The U.S. Congress issued paper money called Continental Dollars to finance the American Revolution. The story of the Continental Dollar is familiar to all -- a lot were issued and hyper-inflation ensued. However, the details of this story are less well known. Scholars even disagree over how much...

Economic stress led South Dakota and Delaware in the early 1980’s to eliminate their usury laws and enact other enabling legislation in an effort to attract a new industry and new jobs to their states. Sufficient time has now elapsed to assess the success of the policies adopted by these two...

Analysis of the factors determining rates of economic growth has found that country-specific characteristics have important effects on growth performance. Empirical evidence to date suggests that maintenance of the rule of law promotes growth, while adopting democratic institutions does not...

Using a macroeconometric model we provide a quantitative estimate of the cash transfer or tax cut that would achieve recovery from a severe recession when the central bank is unable to achieve full recovery because of the zero bound. We introduce an automatic transfer and simulate its triggering...

For the six major British North American colonies, five of whom independently issued their own fiat paper money, exchange rates between these colonies are constructed and combined with price indices to test purchasing power parity between these colonies. Purchasing power parity is then tested...

Motivated by problems from dynamic economic models, we consider the problem of defining a uniform measure on inverse limit spaces. Let f be a function from a compact metric space X into itself where f is continuous, onto and piecewise one-to-one. Let Y be the inverse limit of (X,f). Then...