This paper addresses two issues. First, we employ unit-root tests that allow for two endogenous breaks as suggested by Lumdaine and Papell (1997) and, more recently, Lee and Strazicich (2003) to investigate the integration properties of the returns on the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. The...

The shadow economy is an extensive phenomenon worldwide. It poses several questions, the consequences on fluctuations in economic activity being among the major ones. Based on official data, this paper establishes a set of cyclical properties of macroeconomic aggregates and studies how these...

The Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London (2005) authorized the use of eminent domain for economic redevelopment projects provided that there are sufficient spillover benefits to the public in the form of enhanced taxes and new jobs. This paper examines the economic basis for this...

Law and economics scholars argue that the common law evolves toward efficiency. Invisible hand theories suggest that the law is primarily driven by a selection process whereby inefficient laws are litigated more frequently than efficient laws, and hence are more likely to be overturned. But the...

Recent revisionist accounts of corporate governance in both business history and finance are challenging the tradition narrative, associated with Berle and Means (1932) and Alfred Chandler (1977), in which the American model of diffuse ownership and coherent diversification is both an inevitable...

We use a copula approach to investigate the effect of uncertainty on crude- oil returns. Using copulas to construct multivariate distributions of time- series data permit the calculation of the dependence structure between the series independently of the marginal distributions. Further, we...

From the perspective of an existing retailer, the optimal size of a cluster of retail activity represents a trade-off between the marginal increases in consumer attraction from another store against the depletion of the customer base caused by an additional competitor. We estimate opening and...

The input-output bundle of an efficient decision making unit (DMU) is located at a specific point on the frontier of the production possibility set. Returns to Scale (RTS) at this point can be unequivocally characterized. For an inefficient DMU, however, the input- and output-oriented...

This paper examines the effects of low-skilled immigration on the work and fertility decisions of high-skilled women born in the United States. The evidence we present indicates that low-skilled immigration to large metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2000 lowered the cost of market-based...

The paper investigates alternative policies to regulate emissions from polluting product markets, specifically considering the case of the automobiles market. The two policies we consider are: a quota that limits the quantity produced of the polluting model and a more flexible average efficiency...