This empirical study focuses on identifying the key economic factors and other conditions that have influenced the per customer commercial and industrial consumption of electricity in the United States during recent years. Unlike most previous studies, this study uses a 5-year state-level panel...

This exploratory empirical article provides recent evidence on the impact of the US federal budget deficit on the nominal interest rate yield on Moody's Aaa-rated long-term corporate bonds. The study is couched within a loanable funds model that includes an <italic>ex ante</italic> real short-term real interest...

This empirical note seeks to provide evidence identifying key factors that have influenced the per residential customer consumption of electricity in the United States during recent years, with particular emphasis on the degree to which each state has pursued energy efficiency policies. This...

Several recent empirical studies find a strong, positive impact of economic freedom on economic growth. This finding is predicated upon the argument that increased economic freedom elevates the pace of economic activity through incentives and other means and hence generates higher economic...

This empirical study investigates determinants of interstate differentials in the cost of housing for the year 2006. While the literature on geographic cost-of-living differentials is well developed, the literature on geographic cost-of-housing (as opposed to housing-price) differentials is much...

This study examines determinants of bank failures in the US over the 1963-91 period. The results indicate that the bank failure rate is an increasing function of the degree of federal deposit insurance coverage, increased competition in financial services, and the real cost of deposits, and a...

A key issue in health care reform in the United States is the need to contain the inflation rate of the consumer price index (CPI) for health care services (IRCPIHC). Although previous literature has provided a variety of arguments regarding the causes of the rising IRCPIHC, relatively little...

The objective of this study is to investigate the 'micro-firm health insurance hypothesis', a hypothesis that the greater the percentage of domestic firms that are 'very small', i.e. have four or fewer employees, the greater the percentage of the US population that will be without health...

There is an extensive literature investigating the impact of federal budget deficits in the US on interest rate yields. This literature focuses almost entirely on short-term rates (under one year to maturity) and long-term rates (ten years or more to maturity). However, almost no attention has...

The US Supreme Court in 1977 declared that most bans on lawyer advertising were unconstitutional. Since that decision, the volume of lawyer advertising has grown very rapidly. In addition, since the mid-1980s, Gallup polls indicate that the public's image of the law profession has declined...