Search Results
Journal Article
Will the tobacco settlement payments go up in smoke?
In December 1995, Massachusetts attorney general Scott Harshbarger filed a civil suit against the tobacco industry. The Commonwealths lawsuit charged that the tobacco industry had conducted research into the addictive properties of nicotine and used this research to willfully manipulate the nicotine level of cigarettes in order to addict smokers and increase cigarette sales. The lawsuit asked the court for damages to compensate the Commonwealth for expenditures paid to treat smoking-related illnesses. At the time this litigation was filed, Massachusetts was the fifth state in the nation to ...
Working Paper
Is the U.S. economy characterized by endogenous growth?: a time-series test of two stochastic growth models
In this paper, I conduct a structural change test that casts doubt on the validity of exogenous growth assumptions. Cross-sectional empirical support for non-stochastic convergence in the neoclassical growth model is the reason that the literature rejects endogenous growth. But, in a stochastic world, both neoclassical and endogenous growth models exhibit disequilibrium adjustment dynamics, thus convergence is not sufficient to reject endogenous growth. After testing for cointegration in regional per-capita incomes, I extract a single common trend to control for non-stationarity in ...
Journal Article
How will New Hampshire solve its school funding problem? part 2 of 3
Ever since the New Hampshire Supreme Court decided in Claremont II that the local property tax used to fund K-12 public education was unconstitutional, policymakers have struggled to find a permanent solution to the school finance problem. In 1999, the legislature enacted an interim funding plan centered around a temporary statewide property tax. The price tag of providing New Hampshire students with an "adequate" education was set at $825 million in spending, but the funding plan raised revenues of only about $725 million. Thus, lawmakers were aware that they would have to revisit the ...
Journal Article
How will future aid cuts affect New England's public sector?
Journal Article
Is New England underinvesting in public infrastructure?
Journal Article
Should Internet sales transactions be taxed?
Over the past three years, electronic commerce has grown explosively at rates of 200 to 300 percent per year. After spending just $2.4 billion over the Internet in 1997, consumers transacted about $25 billion in Internet sales in 1999, according to an estimate by Ernst & Young. The firm predicts that the value of on-line transactions will double to $50 billion in the current year. By 2004, says Forrester Research, Internet sales to consumers will reach $184 billion, an annualized growth rate of 49 percent over the five-year period from 2000 to 2004.
Journal Article
Are state government debt levels too high?
Journal Article
How will New Hampshire solve its school funding problem?: part 3 of 3
Ever since the New Hampshire Supreme Court decided in Claremont II that the local property tax used to fund K-12 public education was unconstitutional, policymakers have struggled to find a permanent solution to the school finance problem. In June 2001, after a rancorous two-year public debate, and nearly four years after the Claremont II decision, policymakers enacted a second plan that made the statewide property tax permanent and added sufficient supplemental revenues to finance the legislature's definition of the amount required to fund an "adequate" education. However, the school ...