Previous studies have argued that global value chains (GVCs) have increased the sensitivity of trade to external business cycle shocks. This may occur either because GVC trade is concentrated in durable goods industries, which are known to have high income elasticities (a composition effect), or...

Despite a well-established correlation between alcohol intake and various risk-taking sexual behaviors, the causality remains unknown. I model the effect of alcohol use on the likelihood of pregnancy among youth using a variety of estimation techniques. The preference is given to the...

We analyze the forecasting performance of small mixed frequency factor models when the observed variables share stochastic trends. The indicators are observed at various frequencies and are tied together by cointegration so that valuable high frequency information is passed to low frequency...

Managing water resources independently may result in substantial economic losses when those resources are interdependent with each other and with other environmental resources. We first develop general principles for using resources with spillovers, including corrective taxes (subsidies) for...

Due to the large social costs of juvenile crime, policymakers have long been concerned about its causes. In the 2009-10 school year, the State of Hawaii responded to fiscal strains by furloughing all school teachers employed by the Department of Education and canceling class for seventeen...

Payments for ecosystem services should be informed by how both the providing-resource and the downstream resource are managed. We develop an integrated model that jointly optimizes conservation investment in a watershed that recharges a downstream aquifer and groundwater extraction from the...

Among the ethical objections to intergenerational impartiality is the violation of consumer sovereignty given that individuals are impatient. We accommodate that concern by distinguishing intra- and inter-generational discounting in an OLG model suitable for analyzing sustainability issues....

Recent research on the excise tax effects of the property tax in small, multi-sector open economies suggests that the property tax may not be fully forward shifted to consumers as previously believed. I adapt this analysis to examine whether local hotel property taxes in Hawaii are fully passed...

This essay examines the current dispute between state and local governments in the U.S. and online travel companies (OTCs) over the appropriate hotel occupancy tax base for online hotel bookings. It addresses the question of what should be the appropriate tax base in designing hotel occupancy...

It is natural to turn to the richness of panel data to improve the precision of estimated tourism demand elasticities. However, the likely presence of common shocks shared across the underlying macroeconomic variables and across regions in the panel has so far been neglected in the tourism...