This paper evaluates whether tasting notes - the brief testimony that describes the sensory properties of wines - add value. The analysis is based on a sample of over 2700 recent vintage cabernet sauvignon wines evaluated by Wine Spectator. I estimate a dynamic wine price model to evaluate the...

A large and growing literature investigates the effects of economic policy uncertainty on various measures of economic activity. Virtually all of it concentrates on the modern era. We show that estimates based on post-WWII data likely suffer from an attenuation bias because the modern-period...

Conventional wisdom has it that the Clayton Act of 1914 was enacted as a replacement for the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890: as markets found a way of circumventing the antitrust Act, the story goes, monopolies and trusts began to develop again at the beginning of the century, making it necessary...

Many scholars in both the United States and China argue that a lot of the news stories about China published in major U.S. newspapers tend to have a negative slant. This tendency has generally been called “China bashing.” The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) to quantify and measure...

We construct a time series of political party ideology, based on Poole and Rosenthal's (1997) NOMINATE scores, for the 1950-98 period. The results show that (1) party ideology has become increasingly more polarized over this period; and (2) that it is very sensitive to business cycle conditions....

One of the most popular measures of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) is an index based on newspapers coverage of particular keywords. The constructed index is often then included in VAR models to examine the extent to which EPU affects economic activity. Researchers, however, have not...

This paper decomposes government spending into its temporary and permanent components using Baker’s et. al. economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in a bivariate SVAR setting with long-run constraints, a la Blanchard and Quah (1989). To illustrate the applicability of the bivariate moving average...

Research has found that negative liquidity shocks contract bank lending and amplify economic downturns. This paper investigates a reverse scenario — the effects of a flooding of liquidity on financial markets, using the case of Puerto Rico as a quasi-natural experiment. The U.S. Tax Reform Act...

One of the most frequently debated issues in Congress over the past few years has been the value of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) relative to the dollar. It is no secret that congressmen in the U.S. frequently accuse China of being a “currency manipulator.” This paper has two objectives. First,...

Many scholars argue that a sizable share of the news about China published in U.S. newspapers engages in “China Bashing.” This paper quantifies the extent of the bashing and examines its effect on Sino-American relations. To measure bashing, I develop an index based on the count of articles...