The effectiveness of public funds in increasing public employment has long been a question on public and labor economists’ minds. In most federal countries local governments employ large fractions of the working population, meaning that a tool for stimulating local public employment can...

There is scant evidence of business owners engaging in tax-motivated shifts in organizational form. The main reason is the lack of micro data for tracking the movement of taxpayers across organizational modes. By utilizing rich Norwegian micro data on individuals, firms, and firms' owners in the...

Measures of urban productivity are typically positively associated with city population. But is this relationship causal? We discuss the main sources of bias in the proper identification of agglomeration effects. We also assess a variety of solutions that have been proposed in the literature to...

Our objective in this paper is to measure the impact (valence, volume, and variance) of national online user reviews on designated market area (DMA)-level local geographic box office performance of movies. We account for three complications with analyses that use national-level aggregate box...

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) provide cross-country evidence that the resource curse is a “red herring” once one corrects for endogeneity of resource exports and allows resource abundance affect growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer significant while the value of...