Conventional wisdom suggests that small businesses are innovative engines of Schumpetarian growth. However, as small businesses, they are likely to face credit rationing in financial markets. If true then policies that promote lending to small businesses may yield substantial economy-wide...

Using a panel of up to 116 countries from 1970 to 2010 we estimate the effects of foreign aid flows on a variety of measures of institutional quality. We find that aid flows are associated with the deterioration of both political and economic institutions. Regarding the latter, aid flows are...

Conventional wisdom suggests that small businesses are innovative engines of Schumpetarian growth. However, as small businesses, they are likely to face credit rationing in financial markets. If true then policies that promote lending to small businesses may yield substantial economy-wide...

We examine the empirical relationship between the institutions of economic freedom and labor shares in a panel of up to 93 countries covering 1970 through 2009. We find that a standard deviation increase in the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) score is associated with about...

We present microeconomic evidence on US pricing dynamics pre and post-establishment of the Bretton Woods (BW) monetary regime. We track prices of 49 goods (1172 observations) in 1938-1951 Sears, Roebuck catalogs. The average length between (nominal) price changes was over 2 years. The average...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the stated goals of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and then demonstrate that in practice those goals have not been achieved, and at significant cost to US taxpayers. Design/methodology/approach – The objectives are achieved by...

We use U.S. county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state, and local government employments are all...

We use U.S. county data (3,058 observations) and 41 conditioning variables to study growth and convergence. Using OLS and 3SLS-IV we report on the full sample and metro, non-metro, and 5 regional samples: 1) OLS yields convergence rates around 2 percent; 3SLS yields 6-8 percent; 2) Convergence...

The relative stability of aggregate labor's share constitutes one of the great macroeconomic ratios. However, relative stability at the aggregate level masks the unbalanced nature of industry labor's shares - the Kuznets stylized facts underlie those of Kaldor. We present a two-sector - one...