State-wide reports on police traffic stops and searches summarize very large populations, making them potentially powerful tools for identifying racial bias, particularly when statistics on search outcomes are included. But when the reported statistics conflate searches involving different...

Low sex ratios are often equated with unfavorable marriage prospects for women, but in France after World War 1, the marriage probability of single females rose 50%, despite a massive drop in the male/female ratio. We conjecture that the war-time birth-rate bust induced an abnormal postwar...

In early 2004, the U.S. Government initiated the Medicare Discount Drug Card Program (MDDCP), which created a market for drug cards that allowed elderly and handicapped subscribers to obtain discounts on their prescription drug purchases. Pharmacy-level prices for many drugs were posted on the...

We provide a recent account of the diffusion of electronic business in the U.S. economy using new data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. We document the extent of the diffusion in three main sectors of the economy: retail, services, and manufacturing. For manufacturing, we also analyze plants'...

In this paper we study competition among non-benevolent local governments for mobile firms and evaluate the consequences of imposing alternative regimes of competition. In our model politicians act as regulators that offer incentives in the form of recommended output levels and socially-costly...

Past studies have argued that housing is an important driver of business cycles. Housing markets, however, are highly localized, while business cycles are often measured at the national level. We model a national housing cycle using a panel of cities while also allowing for idiosyncratic...

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...

Studies of the predictive ability of the Federal Reserve's Beige Book, an anecdotal measure of regional economic conditions, for aggregate output and employment have proven inconclusive. This might be attributed, in part, to the irregular release schedule of the Beige Book. In this paper, we use...

We implement a spatial probit model to differentiate states with a lottery from those without a lottery. Our analysis extends the basic spatial probit model by allowing spatial dependence to vary across geographic regions. We also separate the spatial effects of neighbors versus non-neighbors....

We consider whether disaggregated data enhances the efficiency of aggregate employment forecasts. We find that incorporating spatial interaction into a disaggregated forecasting model lowers the out-of-sample mean-squared-error from a univariate aggregate model by 70 percent at a two-year horizon.