We use the Stansel (2013) metropolitan area economic freedom index and 25 conditioning variables to analyze the spatial relationships between institutional quality and economic outcomes across 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Specifically, we allow for spatial dependence in both the dependent and...

Evidence of relationships between religious affiliation and the African AIDS pandemic is found in the medical, religion, and sociology literatures. In particular, studies have shown that predominantly Christian countries tend to have higher HIV rates than predominantly Muslim countries. These...

The relative stability of aggregate labor's share constitutes one of the great macroeconomic ratios. However, changes in individual industry labor's shares are essentially statistically independent of one another, and the average values of industry labor's shares vary widely. We present a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the stated goals of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and then demonstrate that in practice those goals have not been achieved, and at significant cost to US taxpayers. Design/methodology/approach – The objectives are achieved by...

We use U.S. county-level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the size of government at three levels: federal, state, and local. Using 3SLS-IV estimation we find that the size of federal, state, and local government all either...

We use Mississippi county-level data on (per capita) income and the percentages of populations that are Black (henceforth "Black") to examine the relationship between race and economic growth. The analysis is also conditioned on 40 other economic and sociodemographic variables. Given a negative...

In this paper, we outline (i) why σ-convergence may not accompany β-convergence, (ii) discuss evidence of β-convergence in the United States, and (iii) use U.S. county-level data containing over 3,000 cross-sectional observations to demonstrate that σ-convergence cannot be detected at the...

We use U.S. county data (3,058 observations) and 41 conditioning variables to study growth and convergence. Using ordinary least squares (OLS) and three-stage least squares with instrumental variables (3SLS-IV), we report on the full sample and metro, nonmetro, and and regional samples: (1) OLS...