The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued paper monies as an important internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged paper monies at face value for specie monies on demand,...

This paper deals with the effects of the geographic concentration of economic activity on productivity through agglomeration economies in the U.S. economy. Our empirical study extends the literature on agglomeration economies in two directions. First we measure and compare the effects on...

This paper illustrates the importance of the role of long-run capacity constraints in a model explaining the effect of real income and transportation cost on long-run lift-ticket prices and lift capacity in a competitive two-sector ski industry. Despite the large number of game-theoretic models...

Conventional discrete choice Random Utility Maximization (RUM) models of recreation demand ignore the influence of knowledge, or site capital, gained over past trips on current site choice, despite its obvious impact. We develop a partially dynamic RUM model that incorporates a measure of site...

We examine the return to innovation in terms of economic growth at the provincial level to assess whether or not policies that promote R&D, such as China’s Science and Technology Policy, have been productive for all of China’s regions. The return to innovation at the provincial level is...

The United States witnessed substantial growth in manufacturing and urban populations during the last half of the nineteenth century. To date, no convincing evidence has been presented to explain the shift in population to urban areas. We find evidence that capital intensity, particularly new...

Economists advocate that the billions of public dollars spent on conservation should be allocated to achieve the largest possible social benefit. This is what we term “cost-effective conservation”-- a process that incorporates both benefits and costs that are measured with money. This...

In 2010 sponsored search advertisements generated over $12 billion in revenue for search engines in the US market and accounted for 46% of online advertising revenue. A substantial portion of this revenue was generated by the sale of search keywords using auction mechanism. We analyze a...

In the 1970s motion picture studios increased their use of blind bidding and non-refundable guarantees in an attempt to reduce the risks associated with producing a small number of large budget films. However, theater owners claimed that blind bidding and guarantees shifted risk to them and...