This paper examines how differences in state bankruptcy laws, specifically the amount of the homestead exemption, affect business location decisions within a few miles of the state boundary. By focusing on these border areas, we are able to more effectively control for unobserved local...

This paper provides a tightly written overview and modest extension of the constitutional exchange and evolution model developed in Perfecting Parliament and uses that approach to analyze the division of authority that one would expect to see in contempo-rary constitutional governments. The...

All levels of government pursue policies to attract new businesses with the hope that these enterprises will create local economic growth. In this paper, we use the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) to determine the effect of a capital tax credit on where firms in different types of industries...

Prior studies on the debt-equity choice of firms focus on capital market oriented economies. This paper examines whether firms in Japan, the world's largest bank-oriented economy, adjust their debt-equity choice towards the target. We find that the leverage rations of Japanese firms do adjust...

An interesting puzzle in estimating the effect of education on labor market earnings (Card (2001)) is that the 2SLS estimate for the return to schooling typically exceeds the OLS estimate, but the 2SLS estimate is fairly imprecise. We provide a new explanation that it could be due to the...

In a highly debated paper, Lott and Mustard (1997) found that allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns reduced crime. Since then, numerous researchers have questioned the validity of the findings. In addition, ongoing work has shown there is an important spatial component to crime. In this...

We use the Stansel (2013) metropolitan area economic freedom index and 25 conditioning variables to analyze the spatial relationships between institutional quality and economic outcomes across 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Specifically, we allow for spatial dependence in both the dependent and...

School district and municipal borders do not always align. Non-congruent borders can create a fiscal commons problem where new development does not entirely "pay its way." In response, frustrated citizens often respond by voting for lower school spending. Using GIS data on Ohio school districts,...

There has been considerable public debate surrounding the efficiency of higher education in the United States. Using Data Envelopment Analysis, we look at the efficiency of a majority of the institutions of higher learning in the United States. Using two different approaches, we find some...

I develop a model of monopolistic competition in which I distinguish between niche markets and mass markets, in the spirit of Holmes and Stevens (2013). Firms choose between entering a small niche market with high markups or a large mass market with low markups. Entry costs have a much greater...