Seismometers continuously record a wide range of ground movements not caused by earthquake activity, but rather generated by human activities such as traffic, industrial machinery functioning and industrial processes. In this Chapter we exploit seismic data to predict variations in Gross...

This paper investigates the long-run economic relationship between health care expenditure and income in the US at a State level. Using a panel of 49 US States followed over the period 1980-2004, we study the non-stationarity and cointegration between health spending and income, ultimately...

The growth of globalization in recent decades has increased the importance of external factors as drivers of the business cycle in many countries. Globalization affects countries not just at the macro level but at the level of states and metro areas as well. This paper isolates the relative...

The impact of the Chinese economy on the U.S. has notably increased over the past two decades. Econometric modeling shows that the U.S. economy is more likely to directly and indirectly (through its trading partners) feel the impact of a negative shock to Chinese output

We analyze the geographic inequality of economic well-being among U.S. cities by utilizing a novel measure of quantity based product-level economic well-being, i.e., the number of goods and services that can be purchased by consumers with an average city wage. We find a considerable cross-city...

This paper considers a simple model of credit risk and derives the limit distribution of losses under different assumptions regarding the structure of systematic and idiosyncratic risks and the nature of firm heterogeneity. The theoretical results obtained indicate that if firm-specific risk...