Economic development incentives are offered by local governments in the United States to retain or attract manufacturing and/or commercial enterprises. We are concerned with "first wave" incentives that began in the United States in the 1970s and continue until today. These include:...

This research examines whether teacher licensure test scores and other teacher qualifications affect high school student achievement. The results are based on longitudinal student-level data from Los Angeles. The achievement analysis uses a value-added approach that adjusts for both student and...

How does contagion risk affect the business cycle? We find that the presence of contagion risk significantly alters the transmission of standard macroeconomic shocks. Relative to the first-best equilibrium, the contagion externality significantly reduces the response of output to a technology...

This paper studies how wealth and health inequalities have interacted with the Covid-19 epidemic in a way that has reinforced inequalities in income, savings, epidemic risk and even individual preventive behaviors. We present in more detail two papers and their theoretical and empirical results....

The COVID-19 is having an unprecedented impact in the commercial and trade sphere globally. Businesses of all sizes are finding it difficult to operate efficiently and many struggle to meet contractual obligations. Agency is a ubiquitous concept in trade and commerce. The sudden implosion of...

On March 11, 2011 the strongest recorded in Japan earthquake occurred which triggered a powerful tsunami and caused a nuclear accident in the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Plant Station. The triple 2011 disaster has had immense impacts on people life, health and property, social infrastructure and...

On March 11, 2011, the strongest ever recorded in Japan earthquake occurred which triggered a powerful tsunami and caused a nuclear accident in Fukushima nuclear plant. The latter was a “manmade” disaster having immense impacts on people’s life, health, and property, infrastructure, supply...

TANF and SNAP cases increased by 3.4 million between March and June 2020, their largest quarterly increase ever. This paper explores trends on the caseload growth and pandemic policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. TANF and SNAP caseloads initially rose sharply by 10 and 18 percent, but...

This paper addresses two basic issues related to technological innovation and climate stabilisation objectives: i) Can innovation policies be effective in stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations? ii) To what extent can innovation policies complement carbon pricing (taxes or permit trading) and...

We propose a social choice rule for aggregating preferences elicited from surveys into a marginal adjustment of policy from the status quo. The mechanism is: (i) symmetric in its treatment of survey respondents; (ii) ordinal, using only the orientation of respondents' indifference surfaces;...