Unlike the federal government, most state governments in the U.S. formally operate under statutory or constitutional constraints which limit their ability to run budget deficits and resort to debt financing. A priori, one would expect to find evidence in favor of an intertemporally balanced budget, or fiscal sustainability, among states, especially those that are characterized by a high degree ...

Price-based interventions can be corrective where users extract from a common resource, but may also impact existing social norms, often crowding them out. In contrast, I find a pumping tax implemented by a group of irrigators in Southern Colorado effectively crowded-in pro-conservation norms, enhancing the financial incentive’s impact. Using a unique, spatially oriented panel-data set of groun...

One theory argues that state ownership of infrastructure is greater in poor countries because the social returns from investment exceed the private returns by a wider margin. Another theory argues that state ownership is greater when legal and political institutions provide weak enforcement of private property rights or weak limits on government excess. I test these theories using cross-country...

This paper compares the dynamic consistency of targeting methodologies that use multidimensional welfare indicators with those based on means and proxy means tests using panel data from Mexico. To make these comparisons, an extension of the Alkire and Foster (2008) dual cutoff multidimensional poverty methodology is proposed. This extension provides a relative approach to multidimensional depri...

We investigate how Germany’s mandated 50% labor representation on supervisory boards affects layoffs and wages during adverse industry shocks. We hypothesize that parity-codetermination helps the implementation of implicit contracts that insure employees against adverse shocks. We estimate difference-in-differences in employment and wages using panel data at the establishment level. The results...

A policy debate continues about the relative merits and and negative consequences of federal policies that encourage patent protection to university research results. Given the importance of university research for innovation in many industries, the effects of such policies are of critical importance to firms. This paper examines the impact of the increase in university patenting on the effecti...

The focus of this paper is on the implications of income uncertainty for the optimal labor supply. The meaningful distinction between Knightian uncertainty, which is often attributed to Frank Knight (1921), and risk is allowed. Agents are both uncertainty averse and risk averse. The labor-leisure and the labor-leisure-saving choices are studied under Knightian uncertainty in one-period and two-...

Labor’s share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network industries (e.g. telecommunications and utilities). We present a model with agency problems, imperfect produc...

We propose a simple but effective estimation procedure to extract the level and the volatility dynamics of a latent macroeconomic factor from a panel of observable indicators. Our approach is based on a multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic exact factor model that can take into account the heteroskedasticity feature shown by most macroeconomic variables and relies on an iterated Kalman fil...

Rising obesity rates may contribute to greenhouse gas emissions both directly through increased food production and indirectly through higher passenger weights and increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Using panel data for the fifty US states over the period 1997 to 2011 we examine the relationship between the obesity rate and carbon dioxide emissions from energy use. Results indicate a positive a...