#2008-020A "Institutions and Government Growth: A Comparison of the 1890s and the 1930s"
by Thomas A. Garrett, and Russell M. Rhine
June 2008

Statistics on the size and growth of the U.S. federal government, along with the rhetoric of President Franklin Roosevelt, seem to indicate that the Great Depression was the event that started the dramatic growth in government spending and intervention in the private sector that has continued to the present day. More...

#2008-016A "Local Price Variation and Labor Supply Behavior"
by Dan Black, Natalia Kolesnikova, and Lowell J. Taylor
June 2008

In standard economic theory, labor supply decisions depend on the complete set of prices: the wage and the prices of relevant consumption goods. Nonetheless, most of theoretical and empirical work ignores prices other than wages when studying labor supply. The question we address in this paper is whether the common practice of ignoring local price variation in labor supply studies is as innocuous as has generally been assumed. More...

#2008-006A "The Dynamic Interaction of Order Flows and the CAD/USD Exchange Rate"
by Nikola Gradojevic, and Christopher J. Neely
February 2008

We explore the relationship between disaggregated order flow, the Canada/U.S. dollar (CAD/USD) market and U.S. macroeconomic announcements. Three types of CAD order flow and the CAD/USD are cointegrated. More...

#2007-046B "Urban Crime and Labor Mobility"
by Subhayu Bandyopadhyay, Santiago Pinto, and Christopher H. Wheeler
October 2007
Revised March 2008

We present a model of crime where two municipalities exist within a metropolitan statistical area (MSA). More...

#2007-045C "Human Capital Externalities and Adult Mortality in the U.S."
by Christopher H. Wheeler
October 2007
Revised January 2008

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. More...

#2007-043C "Why Do So Few Women Work in New York (and So Many in Minneapolis)? Labor Supply of Married Women Across U.S. Cities"
by Dan Black, Natalia Kolesnikova, and Lowell J. Taylor
October 2007
Revised May 2008

This paper documents two related little-noticed features of U.S. labor markets: (1) that there is currently substantial variation in the labor market participation rates and annual work hours of married women across cities, and (2) that the dramatic increase in married women's labor supply over the past 60 years has varied substantially across cities in timing and magnitude. More...

#2007-042B "Inter-temporal Differences in the Income Elasticity of Demand for Lottery Tickets"
by Thomas A. Garrett, and Cletus C. Coughlin
October 2007
Revised February 2008

We estimate annual income elasticities of demand for lottery tickets using seventeen or more years of county-level data for three states. More...

#2007-031A "Earnings Functions When Wages and Prices Vary by Location"
by Dan Black, Natalia Kolesnikova, and Lowell J. Taylor
August 2007

In this paper we study whether location-specific price variation likely affects statistical inference and theoretical interpretation in the empirical implementation of human capital earnings functions. More...

#2007-012C "Government Growth and Private Contributions to Charity"
by Thomas A. Garrett, and Russell M. Rhine
March 2007
Revised May 2008

We exploit the time series properties of charitable giving data to provide additional insights into the relationship between charitable contributions and government spending. More...

#2007-007A "Social Learning and Monetary Policy Rules"
by Jasmina Arifovic, James B. Bullard, and Olena Kostyshyna
March 2007

We analyze the effects of social learning in a widely-studied monetary policy context. More...