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The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was designed to reveal the economic, social, and environmental trade-offs associated with conventional economic growth as traditionally measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Although originally designed for use at the national scale, an interest has developed in the United States in a state-level uptake of the GPI to inform and guide policy. This study presents the first fifty-state estimate for U.S. GPI in order to address questions over its design, implementation, and ultimate potential as a tool to guide state-level economic policy. Following a review of the current state of analysis and critique of GPI, we provide an overview of methodology and database development. Results are then presented, including discussion of lessons learned through a fifty-state application. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research and next steps to consolidating a consistent methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the effect of the sharp and sustained decline after June 2014 in the global price of crude oil (and hence in the U.S. price of gasoline) on U.S. real GDP growth. Our analysis suggests that this decline produced a cumulative stimulus of about 0.9 percent of real GDP by raising private real consumption and non-oil-related business investment, and an additional stimulus of 0.04 percent, reflecting a shrinking petroleum trade deficit. This stimulative effect, however, has been largely offset by a large reduction in real investment by the oil sector. Hence, the net stimulus since June 2014 has been close to zero. We show that the U.S. economy's response was not fundamentally different from that observed after the oil price decline of 1986. Then as now, the U.S. economy's response is consistent with standard economic models of the transmission of oil price shocks. We find no evidence that frictions in reallocating capital and labor across sectors or increased uncertainty about the price of gasoline explain the sluggish response of U.S. real GDP growth. Nor do we find evidence of financial contagion, of spillovers from oil-related investment to non-oil-related investment, of an increase in household savings, or of households deleveraging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents an analysis of the relationship between per capita CO2 emissions as an environmental degradation indicator and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) as an economic growth indicator within the framework of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). For this purpose, non-linear panel models are estimated for the Annex I countries, non-Annex countries, and whole parties with respect to data availability of the United States Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the period 1960–2012. The empirical results of the panel smooth transition models (PSTR) show that the environmental deterioration rises in the first phase of growth for all data sets. Afterwards, the environmental degradation cannot be prevented, but the increase in the amount of environmental degradation decreases. The findings of this study give an insight regarding the differential environmental impact of economic growth between developed and developing countries. While the validity of a traditional EKC relation regarding the CO2 emissions cannot be affirmed for any group of countries in our sample, empirical results indicate the existence of multiple regimes where economic growth hampers environmental quality, but its severity decreases at each consecutive regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture is a somewhat nebulous term, particularly in the context of accounting scholarship. Historically, it has been offered as a factor to explain many economic phenomena, including tax evasion. Utilizing Hofstede's (1980, 2001) cultural dimensions and data from the World Bank from 2005-2010, this study takes an exploratory approach to develop a stepwise, forward selection regression model to better illuminate this phenomenon vis-à-vis culture and economic structure. The results suggest, at least within the context of tax evasion, that cultural indices may be redundant in the presence of other readily available socio-economic indicators. This brings the age-old debate of culture versus structure to the forefront of accounting scholarship and policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nighttime lights (NTL) are a popular type of data for evaluating economic performance of regions and economic impacts of various shocks and interventions. Several validation studies use traditional statistics on economic activity like national or regional gross domestic product (GDP) as a benchmark to evaluate the usefulness of NTL data. Many of these studies rely on dated and imprecise Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) data and use aggregated units such as nation-states or the first sub-national level. However, applied researchers who draw support from validation studies to justify their use of NTL data as a proxy for economic activity increasingly focus on smaller and lower level spatial units. This study uses a 2001–19 time-series of GDP for over 3100 U.S. counties as a benchmark to examine the performance of the recently released version 2 VIIRS nighttime lights (V.2 VNL) products as proxies for local economic activity. Contrasts were made between cross-sectional predictions for GDP differences between areas and time-series predictions of GDP changes within areas. Disaggregated GDP data for various industries were used to examine the types of economic activity best proxied by NTL data. Comparisons were also made with the predictive performance of earlier NTL data products and at different levels of spatial aggregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide new insights into the relationship between financial market tightness and real activity, using a new database of corporate bonds issued in eight European countries. Bond spreads have a significant negative relationship with four real activity variables at horizons 1-8 quarters ahead. The relationship is robust to adding measures of monetary policy tightness and leading indicators, providing strong support for models previously only evaluated on US data. A subset of northern European countries have similar sensitivity of real GDP to bond spreads, but others have greater sensitivity to bond spreads, revealing diverse responses in Europe to financial market tightness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]