This paper investigates whether volatility of financial development plays a role in determining industrial growth volatility. Three key findings emerge. First, overwhelming evidence supports the view that more volatile financial development raises the industrial volatility in sectors that rely...

In this paper, I extend the Barro-Becker model of endogenous fertility to incorporate specific fiscal policies and use it to study the effects of the fiscal policy changes following WWII on fertility in the United States. The US government went through large changes in fiscal policy after the...

This paper examines markets, firms, and the law as alternative institutional arrangements for organizing transactions that involve transaction-specific investments and uncertain performance. The analysis is the logical extension of Coase’s seminal analysis of the market-firm boundary on one...

This article examines the effects of school lunch subsidies provided through the means-tested component of the National School Lunch Program on the dietary patterns of children age 10- to 13 yr in the USA. Analyzing data on 5,140 public school children in 5th grade during spring 2004, we find...

This study constructs a new measure of nontradability of goods and demonstrates that it can explain the sectoral heterogeneity of the variance of sector-specific real exchange rate depreciation. Our measure of nontradability is the share of labor costs, including those incurred in the production...

In a quantitative model of Social Security with endogenous health, I argue that Social Security increases the aggregate health spending of the economy because it redistributes resources to the elderly whose marginal propensity to spend on health is high. I show by using computational experiments...

This study applies wavelet analysis to examine the relationship between the U.S. real estate and stock markets over the period 1890-2012. Wavelet analysis allows the simultaneous examination of co-movement and causality between the two markets in both the time and frequency domains. Our findings...

This study assesses how fiscal policy affects the dynamics of asset markets, using Bayesian vector autoregressive models. We use sign restrictions to identify government revenue and government spending shocks, while controlling for generic business cycle and monetary policy shocks. In addition...

It is well known that the uncovered interest parity condition does not hold empirically, implying that investments in high-interest rate currencies in foreign currency markets result in a positive expected excess return. Verdelhan (2010) successfully explains this phenomenon by referring to...

This paper uses small set of variables-- real GDP, the inflation rate, and the short-term interest rate -- and a rich set of models -- athoeretical and theoretical, linear and nonlinear, as well as classical and Bayesian models -- to consider whether we could have predicted the recent downturn...