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In the United States, most of the workers who earn at or below the minimum wage are either less educated, young, or female. We examine the extent to which the minimum wage influences the wage differential among workers with different observed characteristics and the wage differential among workers with the same observed characteristics. Our results suggest that changes in the real value of the minimum wage account in part for the patterns of changes in education, experience, and gender wage differentials and for most of the changes in within-group wage differentials for workers with lower levels of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study addresses a popular question in entrepreneurship research—to what extent does the quality of a region's entrepreneurial ecosystem matter for venture survival? To tackle this question, we created a regional entrepreneurial ecosystem quality index based on five key characteristics: supportive entrepreneurial culture, access to finance, availability of human capital, innovation capacity, and formal support organizations. We analyze 301 United States Metropolitan Statistical Areas for these characteristics and measure the aggregated contextual influence on venture survival within these regions over time. In addition to analyzing the relationship between this index and venture survival, we also consider the moderating role of founders' experience on survival outcomes. Our findings confirm that, in general, higher quality ecosystems shelter ventures, while ventures in weaker ecosystems are more likely to fade away and fail. However, for serial entrepreneurs, we find that ecosystem quality has a much smaller impact on venture survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation tillage in American soybean production has become increasingly common, improving soil health while reducing soil erosion and fuel consumption. This trend has been reinforced by the widespread adoption of glyphosate‐based weed control systems. Many weed species have since evolved to resist glyphosate, reducing its effectiveness. We provide evidence that the spread of glyphosate‐resistant weeds is responsible for significant reductions in the use of conservation tillage in soybean production. We estimate reduced‐form and structural probit models of tillage choice, using a large panel of field‐level soybean management decisions from across the United States spanning 1998–2016. We find that the first emergence of glyphosate‐resistant weed species has little initial effect on tillage practices, though by the time that eight glyphosate‐resistant weed species are identified, conservation tillage and no‐till use fall by 3.9 percentage points and 7.6 percentage points, respectively. We further find that when ten glyphosate‐resistant species are present, the predicted adoption rate of non‐glyphosate herbicides rises 50 percentage points, and that the availability of non‐glyphosate herbicides facilitates continued use of conservation tillage as glyphosate‐resistant weeds proliferate. Using a simple benefits transfer model, we conservatively estimate that between 2008 and 2016 farmers' tillage responses to the spread of glyphosate‐resistant weeds have caused water quality and climate damages via fuel emissions valued at nearly $245 million. This value does not account for climate damages due to carbon released during soil disruptions and is likely to grow as glyphosate resistance becomes more widespread and more farmers turn to tillage for supplemental weed control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Common/Single frontier methodologies that are used to analyze bank efficiency and performance can be misleading because of the homogeneous technology assumption. Using the U.S. banking data over 1984-2010, our dynamic methodology identifies a few data-driven thresholds and distinct size groups. Under common frontier assumption, the largest banks appear to be 22% less efficient on average than how they are in our model. Also, in the common frontier model, smaller banks seem to be relatively more efficient compared to their larger counterparts. Hence, common policies or regulations may not be well-balanced about controlling the banks of different sizes on the spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial segregation is a salient feature of cities in the United States. Models like Schelling (1971) show that segregation can arise through white preferences for residing near minorities. Once the threshold or “tipping point” is passed, the models predict that all whites will leave. Our paper uses census-tract data for six cities in the United States from the 1930s and 1970–2010 to measure decadal, city-specific tipping points. We use a structural break procedure to estimate the tipping points and incorporate these in a regression-discontinuity design to estimate the impact on population trends for neighborhoods that exceed that threshold while controlling for city-specific trends in migration. We find that the magnitude of white flight for neighborhoods that have tipped in 2000 has fallen to between 23% and 36% of the level seen in 1970. There was no discontinuity in white flight after accounting for migration trends during the Great Depression. Finally, we show that in-migration of minorities in tipped neighborhoods do not fill in the gap left by white flight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a novel data set for the U.S. states, this paper examines whether household debt and the protracted debt deleveraging help explain the dismal performance of U.S. consumption since 2007 in the aftermath of the housing bubble. By separating the concepts of deleveraging and debt overhang-a flow and a stock effect-we find that excessive indebtedness exerted a meaningful drag on consumption over and beyond wealth and income effects. The overall effect, however, is modest--around one sixth of the slowdown in consumption between 2000-06 and 2007-12-and mostly driven by states with particularly large imbalances in their household sector. This might be indicative of non-linearities, whereby indebtedness begins to bite only when misalignments from sustainable debt dynamics become excessive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Founders face a variety of challenges while working to establish a viable start-up. In order to successfully overcome the many pressures that they face, founders must make difficult choices about how to allocate their time and how much effort to exert in their ventures. These founders are also embedded in a broader social context, and their efforts are influenced by external conditions. In this study, we examine one particular social condition—pace of life—and its relationship on entrepreneurial work effort. We argue that the pace of life in the region where founders launch and run their ventures affects their work effort over and above other individual- and firm-level characteristics. We also argue that this direct relationship can strengthen or weaken depending on founding team size or entrepreneurial experience. Our longitudinal analyses of nearly 2600 US new ventures from 2004 to 2011 support our arguments. Our work advances prior research on the determinants of entrepreneurial work effort, enhances the literature on social norms and entrepreneurial action, and provides additional insights into the multilevel influences of entrepreneurial activity. While entrepreneurs are commonly perceived as non-conformists who march to the beat of their own drum, we find evidence suggesting that regional pace of life actually sets the tempo for business owners and influences the amount of effort that they allocate to their ventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The empirical evidence presented in this study indicates that political contributions and corruption are complements, rather than substitutes. Based on panel data for seven election cycles, regression results show that in the United States, political contributions and federal corruption convictions are positively correlated. Accordingly, we propose an alternative explanation for the relationship between political contributions and corruption: two components of a comprehensive strategy for rent-seeking. As long-term investments, political contributions influence legislators to change the rules of the game; as short-term investments, corruption influences public officials to sidestep the existing rules, in order to maximize the rent collected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses a comprehensive dataset on social spending covering the period 1984–2010 for developing countries, and the unique cross-country database on poverty to explore the poverty-reducing role of social protection during financial crises. The results indicate that financial crises are associated with increases in the rates of growth of the poverty headcount and the poverty gap of 12% and 7%, respectively. These detrimental poverty effects of financial crises are significantly lower in countries with higher social spending, suggesting the importance of social protection for poverty reduction in times of crisis and potential gains from policy intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings and implications associated with the millions of financial and other fraud complaints that are reported to the Federal Trade Commission and published in the Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book each year since 2002. Based on the three dimensions, namely, the number of complaints, growth rates and geographic locations of those crimes, this study found similar as well as unique trends that are new and are critical for addressing the rise of cybercrimes in the USA. The trends and patterns identified may also have implications for addressing cybercrimes in other parts of the world.Design/methodology/approach This research is a cross-sectional time-series study that covers frauds and cybercrimes in the USA from 2002 to 2015. The observed cases included the number of total complaints, complaints categories and payment amount or loss incurred both at the national and state levels. First, aggregate fraud totals, categories, payments and payment methods were analyzed and ranked. Second, state data for fraud categories, payments and filing rate per capita were organized into panel data for analysis, comparison and ranking. This cross-sectional and longitudinal approach of the different dimensions of financial and other frauds generate new rankings and more robust results.Findings The key findings are related to the long-term occurrences and trends of financial and online frauds in the USA. While some general trends are consistent with prior studies, the cross-sectional and longitudinal panel analysis produced some unique results. States that reported the most complaints do not necessarily rank high when examined with their growth per capital or their rates of growth. Their rankings could change dramatically due to other factors. In addition, eight of the top ten crime categories are the same both at the national and state levels, indicating that law enforcement could target the same crime categories.Originality/value The panel data analysis is new (first attempt at using this technique on the data set) and robust because it allows cross-sectional and longitudinally analysis of the various financial and online fraud crimes, in aggregate and by state, for a more comprehensive and comparative examination of the fraud behavioral trends. This research can be viewed as an improvement over earlier studies because the panel analysis identifies what fraud trends, scam types and payment amount exist on the national and state levels. The rate of fraud growth in the respective states provides a better understanding about future development of this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically examines how job destruction affects the impact of imports on U.S. wages from 1983 to 1999. Based on Helpman et al. (Econometrica 78:1239-1283, 2010), I raise the concern that if the probability of displacing workers by imports depends on their wage level, job destruction is likely to reduce the negative effects of import competition on average industry wage. To connect Helpman, Itskhoki, and Redding to my empirical analysis, I focus on variations in workers' residual wages obtained from estimating the Mincerian wage equation. This is because Helpman, Itskhoki, and Redding focus on the wage distribution of workers with the same observed characteristics. I find that the lower the job destruction is than average, the more significant and sizeable the negative effect of import competition on the average residual wage, while the effect of import competition on the average residual wage is positive but insignificant at the 10% level at maximum job destruction. The robustness checks support this evidence. The findings imply that unemployment by increased imports leads to underestimating workers' anxiety about the negative wage effects of imports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks that the impact of public and human capital in production functions of 48 U.S. states. Topics discussed include the production function formula that involves total factor productivity (TFC), computation of public capital and human capital in the states through the Pesaran's cross-sectional dependence (CD), and results revealed states with highest positive elasticities in public capital like Alabama, Kansas and Arizona.

Extant research has focused on the role of host country corruption as either an attractant or deterrent to foreign investment. These studies generally contend that corruption acts more like a ‘grabbing hand’ than as a ‘helping hand’. However, it is plausible that a significant component of foreign investment may be attracted to locales that offer opaque financial environments. Specifically, we hypothesize that money laundering opportunities may encourage illicit capital flows into certain jurisdictions. Using the USA as the ‘source’ country, we investigate the effect of corruption and money laundering opportunities on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows. The empirical findings indicate that corruption deters foreign investment, while money laundering opportunities attract it. We also show that the effect of money laundering and corruption vary based on the host country's level of development. Our findings bolster the contention that FDI into certain host countries is motivated by a facilitation of illicit capital flows. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines why monetary policy at the national level can have vastly different effects on appreciation rates of single family houses across metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). The study employs Case/Shiller monthly house price index data for 19 MSAs from 1992:06 to 2014:12 and FHFA quarterly house price index data for 94 MSAs from 1992:3 to 2014:4. We model the importance of MSA-specific demand and supply characteristics through a set of interaction terms between these factors and monetary policy. The empirical analysis is cast in terms of a state-space approach with a stochastic trend component to absorb the impact of omitted variables. Robustness checks use panel data estimators with interaction terms. A lower federal funds rate is associated with home price run-ups in MSAs that are characterized by higher demand and tighter supply conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) from 1979 to 2007 to estimate within-period lifecycle-consistent labor supply elasticities of US females in a two-stage budgeting framework. The paper combines a variety of econometric approaches to estimate unobserved effects panel data models with censoring, selection and endogeneity. The paper finds evidence of substantial upward bias in estimated wage elasticities from pooled panel models which do not account for unobserved effects, as fixed effects and correlated random effects (CRE) specifications yield smaller elasticities. Estimates are also somewhat sensitive to using a lifecycle-consistent specification versus a standard static model. The lifecycle-consistent wage elasticity from a CRE model with instrumental variables is 0.56 on the extensive margin and 0.31 on the intensive margin for an overall wage elasticity of 0.87. The standard static model, on the other hand, yields a wage elasticity of 0.46 on the extensive margin and 0.13 on the intensive margin for an overall elasticity of 0.59. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies regional impact of three mature public surface transportation infrastructures in the Northeast corridor of the US: highway, public railway and public transit. Infrastructure stock is valued in real terms from 1991 to 2009. A spatial panel approach with fixed effects is adopted to test the hypothesis of spillovers by allowing for spatial dependence. The result shows that public surface transportation infrastructure in general does have a significant impact on regional output, most of which is from spillover effect; highways have an overwhelming influence through both local effects and spillover effects. The impacts from public railway and public transit are not significant, but transit does show a positive though small spillover effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses longitudinal data from the PSID and the BHPS to examine native-immigrant earnings differentials throughout the conditional wage distribution, while controlling for individual heterogeneity. We employ quantile regression techniques to estimate conditional quantile functions for longitudinal data. We show that country of origin, country of residence, and gender are all important determinants of earnings differentials. A large wage penalty occurs in the USA among female immigrants from non-English speaking countries, and the penalty is most negative among the lowest (conditional) wages. On the other hand, women in Britain experience hardly any immigrant-native wage differential. We find evidence suggesting that immigrant men in the USA earn lower wages, while British workers emigrating from English-speaking countries earn higher wages. The various differentials we report in this paper reveal the value of employing panel data quantile regression in estimating and better understanding immigrant wage effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine whether the U.S. and German state governments pursue sustainable fiscal policies taking into account fiscal transfers. Using panel data techniques we investigate whether the debt-to-GDP ratio had a positive influence on the primary surplus ( Bohn model). We show that including/excluding fiscal transfers changes the results. If fiscal transfers are not included in the primary surplus, the test results do not indicate that the U.S. and German state governments pursued sustainable fiscal policies. Our results also suggest that fiscal transfers were positively related to debt. These findings indicate that intergovernmental transfers have implicitly subsidized debts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Licensing requirements for US private security firms and guards differ substantially from state to state. State regulatory institutions for this industry also vary considerably. Some states have specialized regulatory boards with industry personnel (guards, firm owners) and/or public police as board members, while others rely on non-specialized regulators such as Departments of Commerce, State, Professional Regulation, or Consumer Affairs. These cross-state variations in licensing requirements and regulatory institutions provide an opportunity to explore relationships between the two. Private security regulation is of particular interest in this context because previous empirical research implies that allocating more resources to private security reduces crime, and that relatively stringent licensing requirements limit entry, thereby increasing crime. A panel of 1991-2010 state data is employed to see if particular regulatory institutions are associated with particular licensing requirements. Empirical results suggest that requirements for entry into this market tend to be relatively strict when active private security personnel are in control of licensing, and that different patterns of regulation generally apply when police or non-specialized agencies control licensing. Therefore, both public-interest and private-interest explanations for the observed relationships between the structure of regulatory institutions and resulting licensing requirements are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimate efficiency and TFP growth for two measures of congestion and two measures of the monetary value of congestion for the largest 88 contiguous cities in the U.S. over the period 1982-2007. Using stochastic frontier analysis we find that the efficiency scores for congestion and the associated ranking of cities is sensitive to the measure of congestion. In contrast, the efficiency scores and rankings are robust for the two measures of the monetary value of congestion. Most importantly, for the most valid measure of congestion and both measures of the monetary value of congestion, we find that average TFP growth over the study period is characterized by an upward trend. This is an encouraging sign even though in all three cases growth is only zero or slightly less than zero at the end of the study period. We therefore conclude that policies which have been used towards the end of the study period such as providing incentives to carpool and encouraging employers to offer flexi-time and telecommuting arrangements appear to have been effective and should be implemented more widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using country-level panel data from 1950 to 2003, this paper critically examines the impact of the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) on bilateral trade levels. Our empirical analysis uses a variety of specifications, estimators, and robustness checks, including a 'random growth' specification that controls for selection bias from both time-varying and time-invariant unobserved country-specific characteristics. The results indicate that a temporary foreign visitor policy with less requirements, such as the US VWP, tends to increase the bilateral trade levels between the US and the selected VWP countries, especially for US exports. This suggests that VWP may have encouraged business travel and commerce enough such that there are export benefits from this less restrictive temporary foreign visitor policy of about 10-20% (~2-4% in tariff equivalent terms). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the presence of a unit root in real per capita personal income for 49 US states over the period 1929-2004. Employing a panel stationarity test which incorporates multiple level and slope shifts, we find clear-cut evidence of regime-wise trend stationarity after controlling for cross-correlation. Estimates of steady-state growth paths indicate that growth rates have slowed down for about one half of the states while increasing for the other half. On average, growth paths have become steeper by nearly one-and-a-half-fold in the final regime comparing with the baseline regime before the early forties. Overall, this evidence appears to contradict the key prediction of neoclassical growth theory in addition to Kaldor's (The theory of capital. McMillan, London, ) stylized fact supportive of the constancy of output growth rates over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the twentieth century, American wages increased by a factor of about 100, while the wages of professional baseball players increased by a factor of 450, but that increase was neither smooth nor consistent. We use a unique and expansive dataset of salaries and performance variables of Major League Baseball pitchers that spans over 400 players and 60 years during the reserve clause era to identify factors that determine salaries and examine how the importance of various factors have changed over time. We employ a Markov regime-switching regression model borrowed from the macroeconomics literature, which allows regression coefficients to switch exogenously between two or more values as time progresses. This method lets us identify changes in wage determination that may have occurred because of a change in the league's competitiveness, a change in the relative bargaining power between players and teams, or other factors that may be unknown or unobservable. We find that even though Major League Baseball was a tightly controlled monopsony with the reserve clause, there was a significant shift in salary determination that lasted from the Great Depression until after World War II where players' salaries were more highly linked to their recent performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stochastic frontier models with autocorrelated inefficiency have been proposed in the past as a way of addressing the issue of temporal variation in firm-level efficiency scores. They are justified using an underlying model of dynamic firm behavior. In this paper we argue that these models could have radically different implications for the expected long-run efficiency scores in the presence of unobserved heterogeneity. The possibility of accounting for unobserved heterogeneity is explored. Random- and correlated random-effects dynamic stochastic frontier models are proposed and applied to a panel of US electric utilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have been conducted analyzing factors affecting the demand for Major League Baseball (MLB) games. This paper revisits the factors affecting the long-run demand for attendance, employing an unbalanced panel technique for all home games played over the period from 1979 to 2004 seasons for the 12 non-expansion, non-adjustment teams from MLB. Combining both teams and every home game played during 1979-2004 seasons, dimensions provide better understanding of long-run demand for attendance. The study finds that time factors, fan interest, city characteristics, team's performance, and fan's attendance behavior have strong influences on the game attendance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyze the relationships between common shocks affecting the real economy and those underlying co-fluctuations in U.S. financial markets. In order to do this, we test for links between these common factors and also use the econometric theory of non-stationary panel data to estimate the relationships. The estimates prove the existence of significant relationships between financial and macroeconomic factors. It is also shown that there are forces pulling U.S. financial markets to move with the real economy, as seen through nearly instantaneous adjustment to a new equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The level of UK corporate debt directly affects financial stability in the United Kingdom because a significant amount of the exposure of the UK financial system is to UK corporates. Our paper provides a comparison of the determinants of corporate debt in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. The comparison serves to benchmark our findings about the determinants of UK corporate debt. In addition, the UK financial sector is significantly exposed to the corporate sectors in the United States, Germany and France. The model assesses the contribution of investment, acquisitions, cash flows and market-to-book values to the determination of debt, and also the tendency of debt to revert to its optimum level. Debt was found to be positively related to the financing needs of the firm, and the optimum level of debt to be negatively related to the market-to-book ratio. This casts some light on the procyclicality of debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the integration of financial markets and mutual influences of monetary policies in the USA and Asia based on monthly data from 1994 to 2007. We used panel-type and time-series and quantile panel-type error correction models to test the influences of expected and unexpected monetary policy impulses on the interest rate pass-through mechanism in the financial markets of 9 Asian countries and the USA. The empirics show that if interest rate integration exists in the financial markets, the following effects are observed: (i) positive impulses of unexpected monetary policy will lead to an increase in the long-run multiplier of the retail interest rate; (ii) the adjustment of retail interest rates with short-run disequilibrium will lead to an increase in the long-run markup; and (iii) the empirical results of quantile regression prove that when the interest variation is greater than the 0.5th quantile and unexpected monetary policy impulses are greater than the expected monetary policy impulses, the short-run interest rate pass-through mechanism becomes more unstable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A two-way fixed effects Poisson model is used to investigate the impact of 43 EPA-sponsored pollution prevention (P2) practices on compliance and enforcement for a sample of facilities in the US manufacturing sector. I find that P2 adoption reduces environmental violations in three industries while increasing violations in two others. P2 adoption also spurs fewer enforcement actions in three industries. I further partition the P2 practices into three categories based on their approach to improve environmental performance. In doing so, I find that practices that involve changes in operating procedures—about a third of adopted P2 practices—such as instituting a self-inspection and monitoring program to discover spills or leak sources, improving maintenance scheduling and/or labeling procedures, are effective in reducing violations while practices that involve equipment or material changes are not. I also find that adopters of practices that require changes in either procedures or manufacturing equipment—about half of adopted practices—are rewarded with a more cooperative treatment of environmental infractions with fewer enforcement actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anecdotal evidence has suggested increased fertility rates resulting from catastrophic events in an area. In this paper, we measure this fertility effect using storm advisory data and fertility data for the Atlantic and Gulf-coast counties of the USA. We find that low-severity storm advisories are associated with a positive and significant fertility effect and that high-severity advisories have a significant negative fertility effect. As the type of advisory goes from least severe to most severe, the fertility effect of the specific advisory type decreases monotonically from positive to negative. We also find some other interesting demographic effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine hysteresis in EU and US unemployment by panel unit root tests. First generation tests indicate that unemployment is stationary. Second generation tests show mixed results. Idiosyncratic components are stationary in the US. A unit root in the US common component depends on the starting point of the sample. While the common component is nonstationary over the whole period, it is mean-reverting after initial observations are dropped. Hysteresis in EU unemployment is attributed to idiosyncratic, but not to common components. The findings might reflect a different regulation of labour markets and a lower degree of migration in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents new evidence of spatial correlation in USA state income growth. We extend the basic spatial econometric model used in the growth literature by allowing spatial correlation in state income growth to vary across geographic regions. We find positive spatial correlation in income growth rates across neighboring states, but that the strength of this spatial correlation varies considerably by region. Spatial correlation in income growth is highest for states located in the Northeast and the South. Our findings have policy implications both at the state and national level, and also suggest that growth models may benefit from incorporating more complex forms of spatial correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analysed data from the National Education Longitudinal Study to investigate whether experiencing parental divorce during adolescence had an adverse impact on students’ performance on standardized tests. To account for the potential endogeneity of parental divorce we employed double and triple difference models that rely on observing teenagers from intact and divorced backgrounds before and after the divorce occurs. We found that parental divorce does not negatively affect teenagers’ cognitive skills. Our results also suggest that cross-sectional estimates overstate the detrimental effect of parental divorce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews some of the econometrics problems faced when estimating a rational addiction model of Becker and Murphy using panel data. This is illustrated with three empirical applications. The first application looks at cigarette consumption using macro panel data on American states over time. The second application looks at liquor consumption using macro panel data on American states over time. The third application uses micro-panel data on Russian alcohol consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]