The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) guarantees employees 12 weeks of unpaid leave to address family issues. Twelve states and the District of Columbia passed similar legislation antedating the FMLA. However, studies in the economics literature find either small or insignificant effects...

Recent experimental games conducted by ethnographers (Henrich et al. 2004) have shown that groups with higher levels of market integration exhibit higher levels of prosocial behavior. In order to see whether these results are confirmed in a broader ethnographic sample, this paper draws from the...

Inter-county flows of commuters have long been used by the Bureau of the Census to identify MSAs and by the BEA to identify its Economic Areas. This paper looks at U.S. interregional flows of commuters, population, and goods in an effort to identify broader patterns of relationships among U.S....

Positive autocorrelation implies that proximate observations take on similar values. “Proximate” can be defined in many different dimensions. In a cross-section of nations, it can be defined using physical distance, cultural similarity, ecological similarity, or using frequency and intensity...

The U.S. Supreme Court held that litigation for anticompetitive ends (“sham litigation”) must be “baseless” in order to face antitrust liability. The filing of such suits continues apace, as does the legal commentators’ debate, but economic analysis has lagged. Here, a game theoretic...

This paper seeks to shed light on the role of school funding in individual school performance. A unique data set is utilized for the Metropolitan Nashville – Davidson County School District in Tennessee, known colloquially as Metro. In 2005 the Metro school board undertook the task of breaking...

The effects of fiscal spending shocks are estimated by the introduction of a measure of fiscal policy into the neoclassical growth model via a parametric function that distorts the value of newly created capital. The model is estimated by Method of Simulated Moments (MSM) via conditional moments...

The characteristics of time as a resource are examined in order to seek evidence of these characteristics in fundamental concepts of Economics. A series of thought experiments on time travel demonstrate that a constant irreversible rate of time usage underlies the concepts of opportunity cost,...

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