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In their essay 'The Road to Crony Capitalism' in this issue of The Independent Review, Michael Munger and Mario Villarreal-Diaz ask whether 'corporatist cronyism' is a natural tendency of capitalist [...]

The labor share--the fraction of economic output that accrues to workers as compensation in exchange for their labor--was thought by some early-to-mid-20th-century economists to be relatively stable. Yet its decline [...]

The Fed's sustained low policy rate, quantitative easing (QE), and forward guidance have stimulated financial markets and boosted asset prices but have failed to stimulate the economy. As planned, the [...]

Job flows at the establishment and firm level are a powerful tool for understanding employment dynamics. The information at each of those levels is robust, accurate, and timely In addition, [...]

Using data for U.S. counties from 2005 to 2012, we test whether higher levels of economic diversity mediated the effects of the Great Recession via four measures of stability. Spatial spillover effects are modeled by the use of the spatial Durbin estimator with heteroscedastic errors. The data generally support the central hypothesis that higher levels of diversity within a county are associated with enhanced employment stability across all counties as well as subsets of metro and nonmetro counties. Results for wage stability, however, appear to contradict our other findings. We suggest that underlying labor elasticities can bridge these apparent contradictory results. (JEL R11, R12, 047), I. INTRODUCTION The last extended economic recession, which officially started in the United States in December 2007 and ended in June 2009 (BLS 2012), represented a broad-based and geographically widespread [...]

Introduction and summary The sharp decline in the U.S. economy that began in 2007, commonly referred to as the Great Recession, made it very difficult for many Americans to borrow. [...]

Specular stagnation is the latest term of art used by economists to describe the U.S. economy's anemic gross domestic product (GDP) growth path, sluggish productivity, pale record of capital investment, [...]

The Cato Institute was named after Cato's Letters, essays first published from 1720 to 1723 under the pseudonym of Cato, commonly known as Cato the Younger, who lived in Rome [...]

Considerable research has focused on whether or not immigrants' health declines to match that of comparable native-born people. This immigrant health convergence is hypothesized to be driven by immigrants' acculturation to American society and habits. This is particularly problematic for a country such as the United States which combines a high number of immigrants, bad health habits among the native born, and an expensive health care system. Previous research in this literature uses the duration of an immigrant's current stay in the United States as the measure of exposure to acculturation. Using the duration of the immigrant's current stay in the United States implicitly assumes one long-term move. However, the largest immigrant group in the United States (Mexicans) is characterized by a pattern of repeated migration trips. This paper separates out the effects of migration duration and lifetime cumulative experience for Mexican immigrants to the United States. The empirical analysis is carried out using data from the Mexican Migration Project. The Mexican Migration Project has been collecting data on Mexican immigrants to the United States since the mid-1980s. Empirical results find that while overall time spent in the United States supports the acculturation hypothesis, single-trip migration duration has the opposite effect. The positive impact of single-trip duration on health is likely caused by recovery time needed to compensate for difficult crossings into the United States which have an even harsher effect on health if the individual undertakes short, repeated migrations. We also find that having Latino friends improves health while Anglo friends cause faster convergence and worse long-term health impacts. Both support the acculturation hypothesis. Results suggest that researchers need to focus on the cumulative impact of time spent in the United States rather than relying on just the duration of the latest trip. This suggests a much larger negative effect of migration on health than studies relying solely on migration duration. In the case of repeated migration patterns, this imposes costs on both the health care systems of the destination (USA) and source (Mexico) countries. Repeated immigration to the United States can result in acculturation which causes bad health habits to be brought back to Mexico, along with the accompanying costs these incur. JEL Classifications: O15, J61. Keywords: Immigrant, Health, Migration, Mexico, Duration, Acculturation, INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Many Western countries have experienced long upward migration trends. This is especially true in traditional immigrant receiving countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom [...]

In the extant literature of business cycle predictions, the signals for business cycle turning points are generally issued with a lag of at least 5 months. In this paper, we make use of a novel and timely indicator--the Google search volume data--to help to improve the timeliness of business cycle turning point identification. We identify multiple query terms to capture the real-time public concern on the aggregate economy, the credit market, and the labor market condition. We incorporate the query indices in a Markov-switching framework and successfully 'nowcast' the peak date within a month that the turning occurred. (JEL E37, G17), I. INTRODUCTION While the National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee of the United States is responsible for the official dating of peak and trough, their announcements [...]

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), I. INTRODUCTION The standard neoclassical growth theory predicts that economies with similar technologies and preferences should ultimately converge toward the same standard of living. This convergence prediction is particularly relevant [...]

This paper attempts to identify the possible reasons behind a drop of the quits rate in the period since the Great Recession. (As defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor [...]

Milton Friedman (1982, 103) wrote: 'In our book on U.S. monetary history, Anna Schwartz and I found it possible to use one sentence to describe the central principle followed by [...]

In this response we reply to Campbell's criticisms of our article in the March 2012 issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly. We demonstrate algebraically that Campbell's preferred model of the economy, which includes a lagged value of the dependent variable, merely disguises the impact of the president on economic performance. We reject his other criticisms and stand by our article., Professor Campbell performed a signal service by pointing out that analyses of economic performance under Republican and Democratic presidents must control for the ups and downs of the business cycle [...]

Have Democratic presidents since World War II had economic records that were superior to those of their Republican counterparts? In a previous study, I reported findings that there were no significant differences between the economic records of the presidential parties once the conditions of the economy they inherited from their predecessor were taken into account. Comiskey and Marsh challenged this finding with an analysis that controlled for business cycle effects. This article reexamines the issue and Comiskey and Marsh's analysis. The reexamination reaffirms my earlier findings that the presidential parties have not significantly differed in their economic records once the effects of inherited economic conditions are taken into account., Have Democratic presidents had significantly better economic records than their Republican counterparts in the post-World War II era? Some conclude that they have (Alesina and Rosenthal 1995; Hibbs 1987). More [...]

From their peak during the third quarter of 2007, to their trough during the first quarter of 2009, stock prices as measured by the S&P 500 fell 48 percent (see [...]

While the link between natural resource dependence and internal conflict has been approached from a variety of angles in a large and growing interdisciplinary literature, the feasibility-discontent dichotomy still frames a fluid research agenda in both economics and political science. This article attempts to help bridge the gap by allowing for both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of potential rebels. Simple non-cooperative bargaining yields a nonlinear impact of regulatory quality on the likelihood of conflict and shows that corruption and resource depletion jointly affect the outcome. The empirical analysis that follows looks at the effect of environmental depletion and government corruption on the emergence of civil conflicts using a large panel data set. Resource depletion, the quality of governance, and their interaction are found to be significant determinants of civil conflict incidence. Results are robust to model and specification as well as to several steps taken to address potential endogeneity concerns. JEL Classification: Q27, Q56, D74, H56, 1. Introduction Resource-related violence is an important worldwide phenomenon. The stakes are significant, and there are both renewable and non-renewable resources involved. According to estimates, more than one in five [...]