Search Results
Working Paper
What accounts for the decline in crime?
The authors? dynamic equilibrium model guides their quantitative investigation of the major determinants of property-crime patterns in the U.S. The model is capable of reproducing the drop in property crime that occurred between 1980 and 1996. The most important influences on the decline are a higher probability of apprehension, a stronger economy, and the aging of the population. The effect of unemployment on crime is negligible. Increased inequality in earnings prevented an even larger decline in crime. The authors? analysis can account for the behavior of the time series of property crime ...
Working Paper
The business cycle and the life cycle
The paper documents how cyclical fluctuations in market work vary over the life cycle and then assesses the predictions of a life-cycle version of the growth model for those observations. The analysis yields a simple but striking finding. The main discrepancy between the model and that data lies in the inability of the model to account for fluctuations in hours for individuals in the first half of their life cycle. The predictions for those in the latter half of the life cycle are quite close to the data.
Working Paper
Understanding the determinants of crime
In this paper, we use an overlapping generations model where individuals are allowed to engage in both legitimate market activities and criminal behavior in order to assess the role of certain factors on the property crime rate. In particular, we investigate if any of the following could be capable of generating the large differences in crime rates that are observed across countries: differences in the unemployment rate, the fraction of low-human-capital individuals in an economy, the probability of apprehension, the duration of jail sentences, and income inequality. We find that small ...
Journal Article
Return to Capital in a Real Business Cycle Model
Can the neoclassical growth model generate fluctuations in the return to capital similar to those observed in the United States? Equating stock market returns with the return to capital, the bulk of the literature concludes that it cannot. This article makes two contributions. First is an equivalence for the neoclassical growth model between a stock market return and a return based on income and capital stock data. While the stock market return is extremely volatile, the income-based return is not. Second is the finding that the neoclassical growth model with shocks to labor productivity ...
Journal Article
Infrastructure and the wealth of nations
Economies can?t grow without a sufficiently developed infrastructure, but how deep does the infrastructure have to be to make a difference? The authors take a look at some research from the Fraser Institute that examines the relationship between economic growth and economic infrastructure across 123 countries. They find that infrastructure is a bit of an all-or-nothing proposition.
Report
Understanding the persistence of poverty
Millions of U.S. citizens continue to live in poverty within one of the wealthiest and most productive nations in the world. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland's 2006 Annual Report reviews some of the reasons for the persistence of poverty in America and suggests that better education and training may be the best defense against poverty.
Journal Article
Mortgage interest deductibility and housing prices
An analysis of how implementing a flat tax on income and ending the deductibility of mortgage interest payments would affect housing prices. The authors show that, to the extent prices decline, higher-income households would bear most of the impact, but increases in the value of their other assets might mitigate the drop in the price of their homes.
Journal Article
Life-cycle income and consumption variability
By all accounts, economic inequality is growing?the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. This Economic Commentary explores inequality in income and consumption and asks whether inequality is determined early in life, before individuals enter the labor market, or whether it becomes manifest during the working years
Journal Article
Bouncing back from the great recession: the United States versus Europe
When the economic shocks that cause recessions in different economies have large common components, there may be lessons to be learned by studying how different economies respond.
Journal Article
A beautiful theory
It wasn?t A Beautiful Mind?the book or the movie?that made John Forbes Nash, Jr., famous. It was his work in game theory, a theory that models strategic interactions between people as games. Before Nash, the only games theorists could get a handle on were artificial ones with no real-world applications. Nash?s insights enabled economists to expand the use of game theory to interesting practical problems.