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Journal Article
Donor motives for foreign aid
The literature on foreign aid has contributed to our understanding of the motives for developed nations to provide aid to developing nations. In this article, the authors primarily focus on donor motivation, but they also touch on the consequences of receiving aid for developing nations. They consider both the developmental and strategic aspects of giving aid. While aid in the 1960s focused more on development, recent aid has increasingly reflected strategic considerations. For example, since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the objective of reducing terrorism has been of increasing ...
Journal Article
Disentangling diverse measures: a survey of financial stress indexes
The recent financial crisis helped emphasize the need for measures of financial conditions. In the wake of the crisis, several researchers and institutions?both private sector and central bank?developed measures of financial stress. These measures are intended to capture, among other things, the liquidity in financial markets and potentially forecast changes in real economic conditions. Unfortunately, there is no agreement about which variables should be included in a measure of stress. The authors survey a number of financial stress indexes, comparing the datasets from which they are ...
Journal Article
Measuring the effect of school choice on economic outcomes
In measuring the returns to education, economists usually focus on the number of years of schooling. But many people would say that the quality of schooling matters, too, even at the high school level. Does the type of high school attended make a difference in future income?
Journal Article
Regional Gasoline Price Dynamics
A large literature has argued that gasoline prices respond more rapidly to increases in oil prices than to decreases in oil prices. Moreover, some of this literature has found heterogeneous asymmetry in gas price responses across cities. Here, we reconsider the causes of heterogeneous asymmetric pass-through. Consistent with the previous literature, we find heterogeneity in the magnitudes of asymmetric pass-through across cities. We also find a large number of cities that exhibit no asymmetries. We then examine whether heterogeneous asymmetry results from city-level differences in (i) the ...
Journal Article
Output and unemployment: how do they relate today?
Fifty years ago, Arthur Okun examined the relationship between output growth and the unemployment rate. The empirical relationship of the resulting ?Okun?s law? has remained largely intact since then, including during the Great Recession. However, while the law does fit our intuition about economic relationships, it should not necessarily be taken to be causal.
Journal Article
Where there’s a smoking ban, there’s still fire
Since 2001, the pervasiveness of 100-percent smoke-free bans has increased dramatically?from 32 local laws in 2001 to 308 by the end of 2009. The authors use individual-level data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey to examine the effect of these bans in workplaces, bars, and restaurants on changes in smoking initiation, continuation, and cessation. They find that, relative to increases in cigarette taxes, smoking bans do not appear to be correlated with changes in smokers? behavior.
Journal Article
Rockets and Feathers: Why Don't Gasoline Prices Always Move in Sync with Oil Prices?
Given that Americans still spend a considerable portion of their budget on gasoline (just under 4 percent in 2012), it?s important to understand why gas prices don?t always move in sync with oil prices. The latter are determined in a more-or-less centralized market, but the market for gas is often local, with prices affected by location, season and taxes, among other factors.
Journal Article
Okun's law in recession and recovery
The relationship between unemployment and output growth changes during recoveries.
Journal Article
Employment Revision Asymmetries
If employment revisions are systematically biased, they could affect how policy is conducted.