Money demand specifications exhibits instability, especially for long spans of data. This paper reconsiders the welfare cost of inflation for the US economy using a flexible time-varying cointegration methodology to estimate the money demand function. We find evidence that the time-varying...

The consensus of studies of undergraduate principles of economics is that the online format is inferior to the traditional lecture format. This study contributes to the literature by employing a research design that appropriately handles sample selection bias and by using a fixed effects model...

This paper provides out-of-sample forecasts of linear and non-linear models of US and Census regions housing prices. The forecasts include the traditional point forecasts, but also include interval and density forecasts of the housing price distributions. The non-linear smooth-transition...

This paper applies a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) approach to estimate the relative effects of housing and stock prices on US consumption over time. We use annual data from 1890 to 2012 and find that over different horizons and over time, generally the housing price...

We demonstrate a striking but previously unnoticed relationship between city size and the black-white wage gap, with the gap increasing by 2.5% for every million-person increase in urban population. We then look within cities and document that wages of blacks rise less with agglomeration in the...

This paper examines mortgage outcomes for a large, representative sample of individual home purchases and refinances linked to credit scores in seven major US markets in the recent housing boom and bust. We find that among those with similar credit scores, black and Hispanic homeowners had much...

At many large universities it is conventional to deliver undergraduate introductory economics courses in a large lecture hall with a live lecturer. However, not surprisingly, casual empiricism suggests that rates of student absenteeism are significantly greater in a large lecture format than in...

An economic measure of scale efficiency is the ratio of the minimum average cost to the average cost at the actual output level of a firm. It is easily measured by the ratio of the total cost of this output under the constant and variable returns to scale assumptions. This procedure does not...

We analyze theoretically and empirically the effect of preference policies, which favor some auditors over others for reasons unrelated to the audit. For example, an auditee may prefer minority-owned auditors, all else equal. We construct an analytical model of the competitive bidding process...

This paper investigates whether volatility of financial development plays a role in determining industrial growth volatility. Three key findings emerge. First, overwhelming evidence supports the view that more volatile financial development raises the industrial volatility in sectors that rely...