This article is the first to show that foreign investors care about economic freedoms, rather than political freedoms, in making decisions about where to locate capital. Hence more democratic countries may receive less Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows if economic freedoms are not...

While the buzz around income inequality is reaching a crescendo, income data may not be the best measure of overall welfare. Instead, analyzing household consumption reveals that inequality is not as pervasive as skewed public discourse portrays it.

Using data from two detailed, nationally representative, household datasets, we explore whether women who are economically empowered are less likely to experience domestic violence. We find that, while working women may be at a greater risk of violence, higher earnings are associated with a...

This is the first paper that highlights the role of spatial interactions, in the context of state bankruptcy laws, in the entrepreneurship decision. The focus of the paper is on small businesses. Small and medium enterprises represent between 96 percent to 99 percent of allenterprises in the US....

Abstract This paper employs spatial econometrics techniques to estimate the impact of bankruptcy regulation on small firm formation. The estimation of the model is computationally challenging due to the joint appearance of a lagged endogenous variable and the unobserved heterogeneity which...