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Journal Article
Tough lesson: more money doesn't help schools; accountability does
More people are coming around to what economists have long been saying: The answer to failing public schools isn't more money, but more accountability.
Working Paper
Patent licensing revisited: heterogeneous firms and product differentiation
In this paper we study the optimal licensing agreement between a patentholder of a cost-reducing innovation and firms that have heterogeneous uses for the new technology. We consider the case in which these firms are competitors in a downstream market. We extend the competition environment among the licensees beyond the Cournot/Bertrand models considered by the previous literature to a framework with differentiated products. We also assume that potential licensees have private information about the usefulness of the new technology. We characterize two purposes the optimal licensing contract ...
Working Paper
Nonlinear hedonics and the search for school district quality
A school?s quality is often inferred from the premium a parent must pay to buy a house associated with a better school. Isolating this effect, however, is difficult because better schools also tend to be located in nicer neighborhoods and, therefore, cost more for reasons other than school quality. Although recent work has been relatively successful in isolating this effect, it is limited to the extent that it assumes a linear effect of schools on housing prices. We examine this relationship and find that the premium for school quality is nonlinear: There is a premium for houses in better ...
Journal Article
Eighth District population growth follows national pattern
Journal Article
Employment trends in nearby metro areas take different paths
Working Paper
Did affordable housing legislation contribute to the subprime securities boom?
No. In this paper we use a regression discontinuity approach to investigate whether affordable housing policies influenced origination or affected prices of subprime mortgages. We use merged loan-level data on non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood-level data for California and Florida. We find no evidence that lenders increased subprime originations or altered pricing around the discrete eligibility cutoffs for the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) affordable housing goals or the Community Reinvestment Act. Our results indicate that the extensive purchases of ...
Journal Article
The economics of giving
Journal Article
Computer use and productivity growth
Journal Article
Employment growth mixed across Eighth District
Working Paper
Spatial dependence in models of state fiscal policy convergence
We apply spatial econometric techniques to models of state and local fiscal policy convergence. Total tax revenue and expenditures, as well as broad tax and expenditure categories, of state and local governments in each of the 48 contiguous U.S. states are examined. We extend work by Scully (1991) and Annala (2003) in much the same way that Rey and Montouri (1999) extended the literature dealing with income convergence among U.S. states. Our results indicate that most fiscal policies have been converging and exhibit spatial dependence. A more specific interpretation of our general spatial ...