We use the Stansel (2013) metropolitan area economic freedom index and 25 conditioning variables to analyze the spatial relationships between institutional quality and economic outcomes across 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Specifically, we allow for spatial dependence in both the dependent and...

We construct the first estimates of U.S. county nominal and real GDP by broadly defined industrial sectors from 1870 to 2018. Counties tended to converge from 1870 until 1970, but subsequently grew apart. Falling inequality between states explains most of the fall in county inequality from 1870...

We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose...

It has been 70 days since the first case of COVID-19 was detected in the US. Since then it has spread and grown in all but 2 of 376 MSAs and all but 45 of the 636 counties that are contained in these MSA. In this paper we examine the determinants of how rapidly the virus grows once it has been...

In the last several years, much has been written about growing economic challenges, increasing income inequality, and political polarization in the United States. Addressing these new realities in America’s metropolitan regions, this book argues that a few lessons are emerging: first, inequity...

This paper uses the Stansel (2013) economic freedom index for a maximum of 375 U.S. metropolitan areas to estimate the effect of economic freedom on entrepreneurship while controlling for spatial dependence. This paper finds positive and statistically significant evidence that increases in...

This paper decomposes the causal effect of government defense spending into: (i) a local (or direct) effect, and (ii) a spillover (or indirect) effect. Using state-level defense spending data, we show that a negative cross-state spillover effect explains the existing simultaneous findings of a...

Theoretical approaches have been developed to examine the effect of agglomeration on growth. However, the understanding of the mechanisms of agglomeration in developing countries remains unaddressed. This paper aims to give empirical evidence of the role of agglomeration on the growth of Latin...