Most studies of family structure and child outcomes conclude that stepchildren fare little better than children in single-parent families, and substantially worse than children in intact families. Is this because adults treat biological children differently from stepchildren, or are...

We examine the driving forces of G-7 business cycles. We decompose national business cycles into common and nation-specific components using a dynamic factor model. We also do this for driving variables found in business cycle models: productivity; measures of fiscal and monetary policy; the...

Wright (1990) presents evidence on the factor content of trade that indicates the United States tended to export goods that were raw materials intensive. Using factor per unit of output ratios derived from the United States Census of Manu-factures, we are able to supplement Wright's findings for...

We examine the phenomenon of "pockets of teenage illegitimacy" in a model of social approval, where attitudes to such illegitimacy are endogenously determined at a local community level. Both a woman's actual well-being and her community's perception of that well-being in each potential state -...

Random effects estimates using panel data for 42 colleges and universities over 16 years reveal that the economics faculty size of universities offering a Ph.D. in economics is determined primarily by the long-run average number of Ph.D. degrees awarded annually; the number of full-time faculty...

The weekly wage gap between black and white female workers narrowed by 15 percentage points during the 1940s. We employ a semi-parametric technique to decompose changes in the distribution of wages. We find that changes in worker characteristics (such as education, occupation and industry, and...

We make four main contributions to the theory of network formation. (1) The problem of network formation with farsighted agents can be formulated as an abstract network formation game. (2) In any farsighted network formation game the feasible set of networks contains a unique, finite, disjoint...

We explore the interplay of market structure and government trade policy in the context of a heterogenous goods duopoly model (allowing for goods to be substitutes or complements) wherein governments simultaneously and noncooperatively choose whether or not to provide subsidies for their firms...

This paper studies the estimation of a class of copula-based semiparametric stationary Markov models. These models are characterized by nonparametric invariant (or marginal) distributions and parametric copula functions that capture the temporal dependence of the processes; the implied...

This essay, written in honor of the economic historian Robert Higgs, surveys the economic history of African Americans from the end of slavery to the present day. This history, I argue, was largely one of convergence. However, convergence was not continuous but, rather, was punctuated by...