Many regard the 2010-2012 Massachusetts Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) Reform as a national model to improve ex-offenders' labor market outcomes. This reform prohibits most employers from inquiring about an individual's criminal history on the initial job application (the "ban the...

This paper examines how changes in employers' access to job applicants' criminal histories affect ex-offender recidivism. We use extensive state administrative data on individual criminal histories spanning the 2010-2012 Massachusetts Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) Reform, widely...

Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, the spectacular rise and fall of cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted global attention. While the application of distributed ledger technology presents great economic and business potential, significant volatility and...

We develop a new measure of relative debt transparency by comparing the amount of state debt reported in the annual Census survey and the amount reported in the statistical section of the state Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). GASB 44 requires states to start reporting their total...

Tephra fallout is an important type of hazard caused by volcanic eruption, and is also one of the main hazards at Changbaishan volcano, Northeast China. Numerical simulation is an effective approach to assess the dispersion of tephra fallout. According to the theory of dispersion model, we...

In this article we extend the results derived for scan statistics in Wang and Glaz (2014) for independent normal observations. We investigate the performance of two approximations for the distribution of fixed window scan statistics for time series models. An R algorithm for computing...

This paper develops new measures of environmental costs and local revenue capacity as the basis for a new municipal aid formula in Massachusetts. On the cost side, unlike previous studies, we quantify the effects on local non-school spending of characteristics related to uncontrollable costs. On...

This paper studies racial and ethnic discrimination in discrete choices by real estate brokers using national audit data from the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study. It uses a fixed effects logit model to estimate the probability that discrimination occurs and to study the causes of...