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The article discusses the different policy responses for unemployment benefits and jobs subsidies in a group of noncoastal states east of the Mississippi River that they call the eastern heartland. The seven principles that the authors used to assess the economic policy proposal are explored. Some of the rich theories of the possible solutions to the economic malaise of the eastern heartland are also offered.

The article offers a discussion on an article about the macroeconomic effects of the 2017 tax reform in the U.S. It explores a concern on the overestimation of the authors of the effects of the new tax law in the provisions-permanent scenario. The role of endogenous innovation and productivity and the increasing empirical evidence among innovation-intensive sectors of the economy are also outlined.

The article offers a discussion of the different policy responses for unemployment benefits and jobs subsidies in the U.S. An evidence in the literature on the causal relationship between unemployment and opioid use and the national uniformity of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are explored. The political economy objections to place-based policies and the potential covariates of the spatial variation of employment-to-population ratio are also outlined.

This paper challenges the widely accepted stylized fact that chief executive officers (CEOs) in the United States are paid significantly more than their foreign counterparts. Using CEO pay data across fourteen countries with mandated pay disclosures, we show that the U.S. pay premium is economically modest and primarily reflects the performance-based pay demanded by institutional shareholders and independent boards. Indeed, we find no significant difference in either level of CEO pay or the use of equity-based pay between U.S. and non-U.S. firms exposed to international and U.S. capital, product, and labor markets. We also show that U.S. and non-U.S. CEO pay has largely converged in the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper tests the hypothesis of conditional β-convergence in per capita income across the United States by extending the neoclassical growth model to incorporate public capital, government taxation, and human capital, and controlling empirically for technology growth. We expand the period of analysis from the late 1980s when studies using public capital stock have stopped, investigate spatial variation across the United States under various cross-sectional and panel spatial models, and tackle the issue of nonlinearities. All model variations provide evidence of economic convergence across the United States over the period 1960–2005. Resumen Este artículo evalúa las hipótesis de beta-convergencia condicional en renta per cápita en los Estados Unidos, ampliando el modelo de crecimiento neoclásico con la incorporación de capital público, tributación gubernamental y capital humano, y controlando empíricamente el crecimiento tecnológico. Hemos ampliado el periodo de análisis desde finales de los ochenta, momento en que se suspendieron los estudios que utilizaban reservas de capital público, hemos investigado la variación espacial para los Estados Unidos de acuerdo con diferentes modelos transversales y espaciales de panel, y hemos abordado el tema de las no linealidades. Todas las variaciones del modelo aportan pruebas de convergencia económica dentro de los Estados Unidos para el periodo 1960-2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a reply to the article on convergence theory published in the 'Cambridge Journal of Economics' in the U.S. Evaluation on Tinbergen's original theory; Criticisms on the convergence theory; Assessment on state socialism.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, we examine the convergence hypothesis using a long memory framework that allows for structural breaks and does not rely on a benchmark country using both univariate and multivariate estimates of the long memory parameter d. Using per capita GDP gaps, we confirm the findings of non‐stationarity and long memory behavior that have been found previously in the literature using univariate tests. However, the support for these findings is much weaker when using a multivariate framework, in which case we find more evidence of stationary behavior. Based on these results, we also investigate club formation, something that would suggest the presence of conditional convergence. We describe a club formation methodology using the sequential testing criteria that we have employed in our analysis as the basis for forming clusters or clubs of countries with similar convergence characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers comments on an article about the macroeconomic effects of the 2017 tax reform in the U.S. The short-term effects of the business tax reform using estimated convergence rates and a growing number of studies that have exploited historical tax reforms as quasi-experiments are explored. The main implication of accounting for the composition of the 2017 law in terms of the individual and corporate provisions is also outlined.

The economic convergence of U.S. regions has slowed greatly, and rates of long-term nonemployment have even been diverging. Simultaneously, the rate of nonemployment for working age men has nearly tripled over the last 50 years, generating a social problem that is disproportionately centered in the eastern parts of the American heartland. Should more permanent economic divisions across space lead U.S. economists to rethink their traditional skepticism about place-based policies? We document that increases in labor demand appear to have greater effects on employment in areas where not working has been historically high, suggesting that subsidizing employment in such places could reduce the rate of not working. Proemployment policies, such as a ramped-up Earned Income Tax Credit, that are targeted toward regions with more elastic employment responses, however financed, could plausibly reduce suffering and materially improve economic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews catch-up growth in various parts of the world, especially in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on what this implies for the Global South. In 1950, US per capita national income, adjusted for purchasing power, was nearly five times the world average. Since then, Western Europe and Japan have closed their per capita income gaps with the USA. East Asia, South Asia and some other developing countries have also started to close their gaps with the West in recent decades. Thus, after well over a century of growing international economic disparities or divergence, the world has witnessed an era of uneven catching up with the North in parts of the South since the mid-twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slack labor market conditions for women relative to men increase the marriage rate in the USA. This paper examines the long-term consequences of such marriages. Despite the significant effect on marriage timing, labor market conditions experienced in youth do not affect the probability that a woman will marry by the age of 30. Further, labor market conditions at the time of marriage are uncorrelated with the probability of divorce, spouses' characteristics, or the number of children. These findings suggest that labor market fluctuations induce only intertemporal adjustments for marriage timing without affecting reservation match quality or total fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimates of the half-life to convergence of prices across a panel of cities are subject to bias from three potential sources: inappropriate cross-sectional aggregation of heterogeneous coefficients, presence of lagged dependent variables in a model with individual fixed effects, and time aggregation of commodity prices. This paper finds no evidence of heterogeneity bias in annual CPI data for 17 U.S. cities from 1918 to 2006, but correcting for the “Nickell bias” and time aggregation bias produces a half-life of 7.5 years, shorter than estimates from previous studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to two issues raised in this special issue on the American school of international political economy (IPE). I react first to the assumed convergence towards an open economy politics (OEP) framework. While OEP clearly has merits, I find that its narrow conception of actors and interests neglects other approaches' insights into preference formation and institutions that would enable it to offer better explanations of political economy. Second, I respond to the perceived monoculture in American IPE, which many (wrongly) attribute to professional power over journals and (rightly) tie to graduate training in the United States. More to the point of deconstructing the perceived intellectual hegemony driving IPE's monoculture, I challenge Randall Germain's indictment of the Harvard school of IPE. I show that the early Harvard Mafia indeed played a critical role in shaping the field, but it did not determine the myopic paradigmatic and methodological trends we currently see in the discipline. Finally, I reflect on why we have, and indeed need, this transatlantic debate and make a plea for more pragmatism, pluralism and problem-driven research in IPE today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses a series of interviews, undertaken in Australia, Canada and the United States, with capital gains tax (CGT) experts on the preferential taxation of individual capital gains. The interviews explored their views on the taxation of capital gains in their jurisdictions. The interviewees were from academia, government advisory organisations and private practice. This paper focuses on two thematic areas covered in the interviews: the level of convergence or divergence of the experts' views on the benefits, disadvantages and need for CGT rate preferences and the experts' views on how the individual CGT should be reformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces new data on state-level physical capital by sector and land in the farm sector for the states of the United States from 1840 to 2000. These data are incorporated into aggregate accounting exercises with the aim of comparing cross-state results to those found in cross-country samples. Our aggregate results agree closely with the cross-country literature: input accumulation accounts for most of output growth, between three-fifths and three-quarters, but variation in the growth of TFP accounts for about three-quarters of the variation in the growth rate of output per worker. In convergence accounting, convergence of log TFP accounts for about seventy percent of the observed convergence in log output per worker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the convergence patterns of prices across 50 U.S. states over the period 1960-2007, by applying the convergence algorithm developed by Peter C. B. Phillips and Donggyu Sul (2007). The empirical findings suggest the rejection of full convergence across the 50 U.S. states' prices, and the presence of 11 subgroups, or convergence clubs. The main implications of this paper point to the low degree of market integration across the U.S. states, the limitations of using a unique national price deflator to calculate real U.S. state variables, and the different effects that national monetary policy decisions will have on U.S. state prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel model of the hospital industry in the United States in which firms in effect choose their ownership type and the regulatory and tax regimes under which they must function. Accordingly, I develop a model in which firms have identical objectives but differ in their ability to benefit from a given ownership form. Changes in the economic environment alter firms’ incentives to maintain a given ownership type. This in turn induces firms to modify their capacity and encourages some firms to switch ownership type. One implication of this model is that changes in the economic environment that have occurred since 1960 imply that the optimal size of those firms which choose to be for profit should more closely approximate the optimal size of firms which choose to be nonprofit. Hospital level data indicate that this size convergence has indeed occurred. In 1960, U.S. nonprofit hospitals maintained on average more than three times as many beds per hospital as their for-profit counterparts; following a monotonic decline in relative size, by 2000, the average nonprofit hospital was only 32% larger than the typical for-profit hospital. Declining roles of government hospitals, population growth, suburbanization, and increasing government intervention in the healthcare market help explain the convergence in size. Analysis of data at the state and Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) levels is consistent with the principal theoretical predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the hypothesis that the economic relationships between China and her major trading partners have changed over the past 20 years with the industrialisation of China, and the emergence of Japan as a source of investment and network trade in sophisticated manufactures, and the US as a source of finance and investment assets, supplier of services and an apparently inexhaustible demand for consumer and intermediate goods. Has this changed the size and direction of spillovers in the region, and has it curtailed or eliminated American economic leadership? We use time-varying spectral methods to decompose the links between the two leading Asian economies and the US. We find: (a) the links with the US have been weakening, while those based on China have strengthened; (b) that this is not new—it has been happening since the 1980s, but has now been reversed by the surge in trade; (c) that the links with the US have been rather complex, with the US able to shape the cycles elsewhere through her control of monetary conditions, but the China zone able to control the size of their cycles; (d) that Japan remains linked to (and dependent on) the US; and (e) there is no evidence that pegged exchange rates encourage convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract--This paper examines the evolution of productivity in U.S. manufacturing plants from 1963 to 1992. We define a vintage effect as the change in productivity of recent cohorts of new plants relative to earlier cohorts of new plants, and a survival effect as the change in productivity of a particular cohort of surviving plants as it ages. Both factors contribute to industry productivity growth, but play offsetting roles in determining a cohort's relative position in the productivity distribution. Recent cohorts enter with higher productivity than earlier entrants did, whereas surviving cohorts show productivity increases as they age. These two effects roughly offset each other, however, so there is a rough convergence in productivity across cohorts in 1992 and 1987. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents evidence on the long-run trends in U S regional specialization and localization and examines which model of regional specialization is most consistent with the data Regional specialization in the United States rose substantially between 1860 and the turn of the twentieth century, flattened out during the interwar years, and then fell substantially and continuously since the 1930s. The analysis of the long-run trends in U. S regional specialization and localization supports explanations based on production scale economies and the Heckscher- Ohlin model but is inconsistent with explanations based on external economies [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, large cities had extremely high death rates from infectious disease. Within major cities such as New York City and Philadelphia, there was significant variation at any point in time in the mortality rate across neighborhoods. Between 1900 and 1930 neighborhood mortality convergence took place in New York City and Philadelphia. We document these trends and discuss their consequences for neighborhood quality of life dynamics and the economic incidence of who gains from effective public health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beta convergence theorizes that regions with low levels of income will grow faster than regions with higher incomes as investment is moved to regions where returns can be maximized. The formal test for beta convergence is an OLS regression with income change as the dependent variable and initial income as the predictor. Beta convergence is present when the coefficient on initial income is negative. Empirical evidence of convergence is mixed, however. We contend that omission of spatial effects, and the confounding problem of geographic scale, help explain inconsistent empirical findings. We, therefore, examine the role of spatial effects on the standard convergence model at three spatial scales-states, Economic Areas, and counties-in the United States from 1970 to 2004. Our results indicate failure to account for spatial and scalar effects can lead to conflicting results. Convergence evidence is strongest at smaller levels of spatial aggregation, yet model fit is better at larger levels. In addition, accounting for spatial effects improves model diagnostic performance but weakens convergence evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States decided to implement IFRS for its publicly traded companies. The road map calls for the SEC to decide how to proceed to the mandatory use of IFRS in 2011. Developing a plan around IFRS implementation is becoming increasingly important for hospitality companies. The research institute of Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals has published a white paper discussing the impact of the convergence of the IFRS on the hospitality industry. The transition from U.S. GAAP to IFRS will certainly cause some challenges for publicly traded lodging companies. The question is whether individual lodging properties, which mainly use USALI as a guide for financial transactions, will be affected by this transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper examines the extent to which the emerging world trading regime leaves nations the "policy space" to deploy effective policy for long-run diversification and development and the extent to which there is a convergence of such policy space under global and regional trade regimes. We examine the economic theory of trade and long-run growth and underscore the fact that traditional theories lose luster in the presence of the need for long-run dynamic comparative advantages and when market failures are rife. We then review a "toolbox" of policies that have been deployed by developed and developing countries past and present to kick-start diversity and development with the hope of achieving long-run growth. Next, we examine the extent to which rules under the World Trade Organization (WTO), trade agreements between the European Union (EU) and developing countries, trade agreements between the United States (US) and developing countries, and those among developing countries (South-South, or S-S. agreements) allow for the use of such policies. We demonstrate that there is a great divergence among trade regimes over this question. While S-S agreements provide ample policy space for industrial development, the WTO and EU agreements largely represent the middle of the spectrum in terms of constraining policy space choices. On the far end, opposite S-S agreements, US agreements place considerably more constraints by binding parties both broadly and deeply in their trade commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new panel data model is proposed to represent the behavior of economies in transition, allowing for a wide range of possible time paths and individual heterogeneity. The model has both common and individual specific components, and is formulated as a nonlinear time varying factor model. When applied to a micro panel, the decomposition provides flexibility in idiosyncratic behavior over time and across section, while retaining some commonality across the panel by means of an unknown common growth component. This commonality means that when the heterogeneous time varying idiosyncratic components converge over time to a constant, a form of panel convergence holds, analogous to the concept of conditional sigma convergence. The paper provides a framework of asymptotic representations for the factor components that enables the development of econometric procedures of estimation and testing. In particular, a simple regression based convergence test is developed, whose asymptotic properties are analyzed under both null and local alternatives, and a new method of clustering panels into club convergence groups is constructed. These econometric methods are applied to analyze convergence in cost of living indices among 19 U.S. metropolitan cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether the 48 contiguous U S states converge and, if so, whether convergence is absolute. Economies are shown to converge if, and only if, technology is stationary around a common trend. If convergence does occur, it is unlikely to be absolute unless the economy fixed effects in technology, capital's share, and the rental rate vanish. Examining data on the level of technology, capital's share, and the rental rate provides strong evidence that the contiguous U.S. states converge rapidly to levels that are far apart. The rapidity of convergence suggests that factors and technology are highly mobile across the contiguous U.S. states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional income distributions are analyzed and tested for convergence and divergence in the 1970s. The methodology is the same as that recently used to show the almost complete convergence of the South and Non-South. This paper disaggregates the Non-South into major regions consisting of the West, Midwest and Northeast. Tests for rank dominance reveal surprising results. Income distributions in the major regions of the Non-South were equivalent in 1969, and the South was uniformly dominated. Fundamental changes in the 1970s resulted in the West rank dominating the Midwest, which dominated the South, which in turn dominated the Northeast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which investigates the financial integration of stock markets of China and Russia at both national and sectoral levels in comparison with the U.S., euro area, and Japan from September 1995 to October 2010. The study uses a price-based approach for an existence and analysis of dynamics of stock market integration. The study reveals that the integration between Chinese and Russian stock markets depend on the assessment of sigma-convergence.

Throughout her long and distinguished academic career, spanning more than three decades, as a Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent University, Evelyn Brody's work has interrogated three broad themes that underpin and drive charity law – the tax treatment of charities; the governance framework applicable to charities, its application, monitoring and enforcement; and the evolution of charitable structures over time, whether from an economic convergence perspective, a constitutional right of association perspective or from a public/private benefit perspective. This article reviews Brody's contribution in these key areas. It explores the resonance of her work outside of the United States and its relevance for EU non-profit scholars before looking to Brody's research legacy for future nonprofit scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Has the progress of output convergence changed within the United States? This article examines the output convergence among U.S. states for the last five decades by making several improvements over the extant literature. By applying a battery of convergence tests designed to capture nonlinear transitional dynamics to real output per worker data (i.e., nominal values deflated by state-level price), we find that output convergence has not been a feature of the continental United States since the 1970s. Instead, output convergence has proceeded among four subgroups within which constituent states have certain characteristics in common. Our regression analysis suggests that state-level characteristics related to technology and human capital play a crucial role in accounting for the formation and composition of convergence clubs, in agreement with the recent theoretical models of growth and development (e.g., Aghion et al. 2009; Gennaioli et al. 2013b). The level of technology, proxied by patents, turns out to be a consistently significant determinant even after controlling for endogeneity, suggesting that frictions in the diffusion of technology and human capital may have led to clustering of states with different levels of productivity. Our results therefore cast doubt on the common view that diffusion of knowledge and technology across state borders is frictionless. ( JEL O47, O51) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the integration of national and sectoral stock markets between China and Russia and with other three global benchmarks including the U.S., euro area, and Japan. It states that the estimation period was divided into three sub-periods for beta-convergence to analyze stock market integration over time. It says that the national and sectoral levels based on a finding of beta-convergence suggests that the stock markets of China and Russia could be identified as isolated.

We used data from the Chinese stock market to quantify the amount of time for the market to converge to efficiency. Order imbalance may predict returns when there is no designated market maker. In spite of availability of the direction of trade information in the Chinese stock market, it takes longer for information regarding order imbalance to be incorporated into stock prices in China than in the USA. With information on past returns and order imbalance, it takes between 15 and 30 min to converge to efficiency in the Chinese stock market. The process of converging to efficiency depends highly on liquidity. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of economics in the convergence of competition laws in European Union (EU) and the U.S. It is said that economics is an important element in convergence discussions as conception and operation of competition law and monopolization depend on economics. Some economic experts believe that EU law must be changed to bring it into line with antitrust laws in the U.S.

We examine the real convergence hypothesis for 14 OECD countries looking at the fractional order of integration of the differences of real GDP per capita in these countries with respect to the United States. Using parametric procedures, the results vary depending on how we specify the I(0) disturbances. If they are white noise, convergence is achieved for Canada and Australia, and with autocorrelated disturbances, this hypothesis is satisfied for France and the Netherlands. However, allowing for a break at World War 11, evidence of convergence is obtained for all countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study that examined the convergence of income across Pennsylvania counties. Ways to understand the idea of convergence; Information on the testing for conditional convergence and absolute convergence; Reason behind the failure of absolute income convergence; Details on the industry mix of each's county.

The recent literature on convergence has departed fromthe earlier literature by focusing on the shape of the productionfunction and the rate at which an economy converges to its ownsteady state. This article uses advances from the recent literatureto look back at the question that originally motivated the convergenceliterature: what will the distribution of per capita income looklike in the future? Several results are highlighted by the analysis,including the suggestion that there is little reason to expectthe United States to maintain its position as world leader interms of output per worker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a panel of 51 prices from 48 cities in the United States, we provide an upper bound estimate of the rate of convergence to purchasing power parity. We find convergence rates substantially higher than typically found in cross-country data. We investigate some potentially serious biases induced by i.i.d. measurement errors in the data, and find our estimates to be robust to these potential biases. We also present evidence that convergence occurs faster for larger price differences. Finally, we find that rates of convergence are slower for cities farther apart. However, our estimates suggest that distance alone can only account for a small portion of the much slower convergence rates across national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As background for this special issue of the Review, this article provides an overview of recent developments in financial structure in the major industrial countries using national flow of funds balance sheet data. We focus in particular on changes in the size and composition of the balance sheet for the major sectors — households, companies, general government, foreign and financial as well as banks and institutional investors separately. Two recent subperiods are distinguished, namely the ‘great moderation’ of high growth and low inflation from roughly 1997–2006 and then the crisis period 2007–10. We discern elements of convergence — notably in corporate leverage — but also some continuing contrasts — such as household debt — between market- and bank-dominated financial systems, while highlighting that short-run changes arising from the conjuncture may blur longer-term trends in financial structure. Looking ahead, the data highlight common challenges from public and household debt, albeit to an extent that varies markedly between countries. Bank deleveraging and recapitalisation appear slow, while a subsector including shadow banks continues to grow except in the US. There are contrasts between France and Italy on the one hand and Germany on the other which underline the vulnerability of the former in the ongoing Euro Area crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]