The financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession created unprecedented federal budget deficits in recent years. In fact, these events, combined with subsequent slow growth and two continuing unfunded wars, have resulted in a national debt that is out of control by all meaningful measures....

This paper describes the role of government ideology on economic policy-making in the United States. I consider studies using data for the national, state and local level and elaborate on checks and balances, especially divided government, measurement of government ideology and empirical...

Higher economic growth was generated during Democratic presidencies compared to Republican presidencies in the United States. The question is why. Blinder and Watson (2016) explain that the Democratic-Republican presidential growth gap (D-R growth gap) can hardly be attributed to the policies...

Major commercial airports in the U.S. are operated by local governments either directly as government branches or indirectly via airport or port authorities. Recent research has uncovered that those institutional arrangements on airport governance structure matter for airport efficiency. In this...

This paper discusses the 2005 proposal of President Bush's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform to enact a dividend-exemption system for certain foreign-source earnings of U.S. taxpayers. The paper briefly explains why the recommendation should be an improvement over current law, compares it to...

Governments throughout the world are requiring greater use of economic analysis as a way of informing key policy decisions. The European Union now requires that an impact assessment be done for all major policy initiatives. An evaluation of the EU system could provide lessons for the U.S. and...

Apparent ignorance of more than a century of economic history now threatens the competitive constitution of the Internet under the guise of "net neutrality." Net neutrality is a slogan that stands for the proposition that the Internet and physical means of access to it should be available to all...

This paper provides an alternative analytical view of the mechanism by which interest groups influence trade policy. In contrast to other economic models in which trade policy is essentially "bought" by industrial interests, this model views interest groups and legislators as possibly sharing...

We experimentally investigate the nature of cooperation in various repeated games, with subjects from Romania and USA. We find stark cross-country differences in the propensity to sustain multilateral cooperation through bilateral rewards and punishments. U.S. groups perform well because...

“Sustainable prosperity” denotes an economy that generates stable and equitable growth for a large and growing middle class. From the 1940s into the 1970s, the United States appeared to be on a trajectory of sustainable prosperity, especially for white-male members of the U.S. labor force....