This paper examines how differences in state bankruptcy laws, specifically the amount of the homestead exemption, affect business location decisions. We expand upon the literature by narrowing the geographic scope and focus on the amount of entrepreneurial activity within a few miles of the...

Policy makers at all levels of government believe that one of the key drivers of local economic growth is new businesses. Therefore, governments design policy with the intention of attracting businesses with the hopes that this will create future growth in struggling areas. Over the past few...

In this paper, we examine the effect of suburbanization on obesity rates. Our study is an improvement over the existing literature because we will use county level data for our analysis, enabling us to look at the effect of moving from the central city to the suburbs. Previous research has only...

Previous studies have struggled to demonstrate that higher taxes deter business activity. We revisit this issue by estimating the effect of changes over time in cross-border differences in state tax conditions on the tendency for new establishments to favor one side of a state border over the...

There is an ongoing literature in economics examining the deterrent effect of police officers on criminal activity. However, this literature tends to focus on the aggregate number of officers employed versus the relative allocation of an officer's time. In this paper, we examine how the...

This paper examines how differences in state bankruptcy laws, specifically the amount of the homestead exemption, affect business location decisions within a few miles of the state boundary. By focusing on these border areas, we are able to more effectively control for unobserved local...

All levels of government pursue policies to attract new businesses with the hope that these enterprises will create local economic growth. In this paper, we use the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) to determine the effect of a capital tax credit on where firms in different types of industries...

In a highly debated paper, Lott and Mustard (1997) found that allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns reduced crime. Since then, numerous researchers have questioned the validity of the findings. In addition, ongoing work has shown there is an important spatial component to crime. In this...

We estimate the effect of increasing the supply of housing vouchers on rents using a panel of housing units in the American Housing Survey. We do not find that an increase in vouchers affected the overall price of rental housing, but do estimate differences in effects based on an individual...

This paper estimates the impact of violent crime on the location of business activity and entrepreneurship in five US cities. Central to our analysis is the idea that different sectors of the economy will sort into high- and low-crime areas depending on their relative sensitivity to crime. We...