We quantify the impact of transferring productivity-enhancing military surplus equipment to law enforcement on suicide and mortality in the United States. Our strategy relies on federal budget allocations to military within a state to instrument for the value of equipment transferred to law...

The world's oldest undergraduate degree program in data processing and information systems at Mississippi State University turned fifty years old in 2013. In this paper, we review the pioneering activities of the program's founder, Charles Moore, and provide insights into his foresight about the...

I address the degree to which variation in exposure to e-commerce is associated with entry and exit in the retail industry at the county level. To measure exposure to e-commmerce, I rely on within-state variation in relative search frequency for the phrase “amazon prime” as reported by...

Within-state variation in the search frequency for “amazon” at Google is used to measure the industry specific impact of e-commerce on retail employment. To instrument for exogenous variation in e-commerce exposure, I rely on random variation in consumer's use of the Internet for tasks like...

The objective of this study is to quantify the impact of public investment in space programs on the regional economic activity in the areas host to the program launch operations. I implement an econometric strategy that takes the timing of the Shuttle program retirement as a natural experiment...

The discontinuation of the Shuttle program (STS) had a measurable impact on unemployment in Florida's Space Coast, particularly in the years since the initial layoffs in aerospace industries. Estimates of the impact using the synthetic control method suggest that the unemployment rate increased...

I exploit the "perfect ledger" feature of Bitcoin to find the degree to which Bitcoin-to-fiat exchange activity is associated with increased user-to-user transactions on the Bitcoin network with two distinct but complementary methodologies. First, I use an instrumental variable strategy to...