Working Paper Archives
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis working papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critial comment.
Regional Economics
Regionalization vs. Globalization
Both global and regional economic linkages have strengthened substantially over the past quarter century. We employ a dynamic factor model to analyze the implications of these linkages for the evolution of global and regional business cycles.
Interjurisdictional Competition with Adverse Selection
In this paper we study competition among non-benevolent local governments for mobile firms and evaluate the consequences of imposing alternative regimes of competition.
Forecasting National Recessions Using State Level Data
A large literature studies the information contained in national-level economic indicators, such as financial and aggregate economic activity variables, for forecasting U.S. business cycle phases (expansions and recessions.)
Did Affordable Housing Legislation Contribute to the Subprime Securities Boom?
No. In this paper we use a regression discontinuity approach to investigate whether affordable housing policies influenced origination or affected prices of subprime mort- gages.
Extensive and Intensive Trade Margins: A State-by-State View
This paper examines a topic of increasing interest, the potential determinants of extensive (i.e., number of firms) and intensive (i.e., average exports per firm) trade margins, using state-level trade to 190 countries. In addition to distance and country size, other factors affecting trade costs and export demand are explored.
The Effect of Neighborhood Spillovers on Mortgage Selection
In this paper we analyze how spillovers in mortgage adoption affect mortgage product choice across neighborhoods and across borrowers of different racial or ethnic groups.
Much of the literature examining the effects of oil shocks asks the question ―What is an oil shock? and has concluded that oil-price increases are asymmetric in their effects on the US economy. That is, sharp increases in oil prices affect economic activity adversely, but sharp decreases in oil prices have no effect.
Local Cost of Living and Demand Estimation: An Application to State Lotteries
The cost of living varies as much across regions as it does across time, but researchers have only begun to acknowledge the importance of controlling for regional differences in the cost of living when conducting cross-sectional analyses.
Discordant City Employment Cycles
This paper estimates city-level employment cycles for 58 large U.S. cities and documents the substantial cross-city variation in the timing, lengths, and frequencies of their employment contractions.
Ethnic Networks and Trade: Intensive vs. Extensive Margins
Ethnic networks—as proxies for information networks—have been associated with higher levels of international trade. Previous research has not differentiated between the roles of these networks on the extensive and intensive margins.
Crime and Arrests: Deterrence or Resource Reallocation?
We use monthly time-series data for 20 large U.S. cities to test the deterrence hypothesis (arrests reduce crimes) and the resource reallocation hypothesis (arrests follow from an increase in crime).
This paper estimates the dynamics of the personal-bankruptcy rate over the business cycle by exploiting large cross-state variation in recessions and bankruptcies. We find that bankruptcy rates are significantly higher than normal during a recession and rise as a recession persists.
Economic Freedom and Employment Growth in U.S. States
We extend earlier models of economic growth and development by exploring the effect of economic freedom on U.S. state employment growth. We find that states with greater economic freedom – defined as the protection of private property and private markets operating with minimal government interference – experienced greater rates of employment growth.
This paper examines the impacts of banking market structure and regulation on economic growth using new data on banking market concentration and manufacturing industry-level growth rates for U.S. states during 1899-1929—a period when the manufacturing sector was expanding rapidly and restrictive branching laws segmented the U.S. banking system geographically.
The Local Effects of Monetary Policy
Many studies have documented disparities in the regional responses to monetary policy shocks. However, because of computational issues, the literature has often neglected the richest level of disaggregation: the city. In this paper, we estimate the city-level responses to monetary policy shocks in a Bayesian VAR.
The Revenue Performance of Casinos after a Smoking Ban: The Case of Illinois
Recent state-wide smoking bans are likely the most significant regulations imposed on the casino gaming industry. We explore the effects that the Illinois state smoking ban has had on Illinois casino revenue and attendance as well as casino tax revenue.
The Propagation of Regional Recessions
This paper develops a framework for inferring common Markov-switching components in a panel data set with large cross-section and time-series dimensions. We apply the framework to studying similarities and differences across U.S. states in the timing of business cycles.
Is Housing the Business Cycle? Evidence from U.S. Cities
We analyze the relationship between housing and the business cycle in a set of 51 U.S. cities.
Who Benefits from Increased Government Spending? A State-Level Analysis
We simultaneously identify two government spending shocks: military spending shocks as defined by Ramey (2011) and federal spending shocks as defined by Perotti (2008).
City Business Cycles and Crime
We explore the influence of city-level business cycle fluctuations on crime in 20 large cities in the United States. Our monthly time-series analysis considers seven crimes over an approximately 20-year period: murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft.
Income Convergence in the United States: A Tale of Migration and Urbanization
We use non-parametric distribution dynamics techniques to reassess the convergence of per capita personal income (PCPI) across U.S. states and across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan portions of states for the period 1969-2005.
We model the U.S. business cycle using a dynamic factor model that identifies common factors underlying fluctuations in state-level income and employment growth.
Urban Crime and Labor Mobility
We present a model of crime where two municipalities exist within a metropolitan statistical area (MSA). Consistent with the literature, local law enforcement has a crime reduction effect and a crime diversion effect.
Human Capital Externalities and Adult Mortality in the U.S.
Human capital is now widely recognized to confer numerous benefits, including higher incomes, lower incidence of unemployment, and better health, to those who invest in it.
This paper documents a little-noticed feature of U.S. labor markets -- very large variation in the labor supply of married women across cities.
Measuring the Information Content of the Beige Book: A Mixed Data Sampling Approach
Studies of the predictive ability of the Federal Reserve's Beige Book, an anecdotal measure of regional economic conditions, for aggregate output and employment have proven inconclusive.
The Perils of Globalization: Offshoring and Economic Insecurity of the American Worker
According to polls from the 2006 congressional elections, globalization and economic insecurity were the primary concerns of many voters.
A State-Level Analysis of the Great Moderation
A number of studies have documented a reduction in aggregate macroeconomic volatility beginning in the early 1980s, i.e., the “Great Moderation.”
Strategic Online-Banking Adoption
In this paper we study the determinants of banks' decision to adopt a transactional web-site for their customers.
Controlling for Geographic Dispersion When Estimating the Japanese Phillips Curve
This paper argues that estimation of the Phillips curve for Japan should take account of the geographic dispersion of labor-market conditions.
