Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through coordinated rallies across the country on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. We...

In this paper, we estimate the size of the externalities produced by big-box retail stores for other establishments and explore the effect of the externalities on local government policy.

We document the tight link between increased levels of economic and policy uncertainty and unemployment at the state-level during the 2007-2009 recession.

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences?

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences?

In this paper, we estimate the size of the externalities produced by big-box retail stores for other establishments and explore the effect of the externalities on local government policy.

We document the tight link between increased levels of economic and policy uncertainty and unemployment at the state-level during the 2007-2009 recession.

The past thirty years have seen a dramatic decrease in the rate of income convergence across U.S. states. This decline coincides with a similarly substantial decrease in population flows to wealthy states. We develop a model where labor mobility plays a central role in convergence and can...

Has government spending raised income and employment since 2008? I use new data on state pension returns during the Great Recession to recover exogenous changes in spending. Instrumenting with these return shocks, I estimate that each dollar of windfall-financed spending raised local incomes by...