#2008-040C "Are Children 'Normal'?"
by Dan A. Black, Natalia Kolesnikova, Seth G. Sanders, and Lowell J. Taylor
October 2008
Revised February 2009

In his classic work on the economics of fertility, Becker (1960) suggests that children are likely “normal.” We examine this contention. More...

#2008-039B "Did Prepayments Sustain the Subprime Market?"
by Geetesh Bhardwaj, and Rajdeep Sengupta
October 2008
Revised May 2009

Using loan-level data on subprime mortgages, we present evidence on the uniqueness of subprime mortgage design. More...

#2008-036C "Where’s the Smoking Gun? A Study of Underwriting Standards for US Subprime Mortgages"
by Geetesh Bhardwaj, and Rajdeep Sengupta
October 2008
Revised October 2009

The dominant explanation for the meltdown in the U.S. subprime mortgage market is that lending standards dramatically weakened after 2004. Using loan-level data, we examine underwriting standards on securitized subprime mortgage originations from 1998 to 2007. More...

#2008-034C "The Interplay between Preemptive and Defensive Counterterrorism Measures: A Two-Stage Game"
by Subhayu Bandyopadhyay, and Todd Sandler
October 2008
Revised April 2009

A two-stage game depiction of counterterrorism is presented, where the emphasis is on the interaction between the preemptive and defensive measures taken by two targeted countries facing a common threat. More...

FORTHCOMING: Economica

#2008-026B "City Business Cycles and Crime"
by Thomas A. Garrett, and Lesli S. Ott
August 2008
Revised July 2009

We explore the influence of city-level business cycle fluctuations on crime in 20 large cities in the United States. Our monthly time-series analysis considers seven crimes over an approximately 20-year period: murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. More...

#2008-020B "Institutions and Government Growth: A Comparison of the 1890s and the 1930s"
by Thomas A. Garrett, and Russell M. Rhine
June 2008
Revised October 2009

Statistics on the size and growth of the U.S. federal government, along with the rhetoric of President Franklin Roosevelt, seem to indicate that the Great Depression was the event that started the dramatic growth in government spending and intervention in the private sector that has continued to the present day. More...

#2008-016A "Local Price Variation and Labor Supply Behavior"
by Dan A. Black, Natalia Kolesnikova, and Lowell J. Taylor
June 2008

In standard economic theory, labor supply decisions depend on the complete set of prices: the wage and the prices of relevant consumption goods. Nonetheless, most of theoretical and empirical work ignores prices other than wages when studying labor supply. The question we address in this paper is whether the common practice of ignoring local price variation in labor supply studies is as innocuous as has generally been assumed. More...

PUBLISHED: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Regional Economic Development, October 2008, 4(1), pp. 2-14

#2008-006C "The Dynamic Interaction of Trading Flows, Macroeconomic Announcements and the CAD/USD Exchange Rate: Evidence from Disaggregated Data"
by Nikola Gradojevic, and Christopher J. Neely
February 2008
Revised August 2009

We explore the relationship between disaggregated trading flows, the Canada/U.S. dollar (CAD/USD) market and U.S. macroeconomic announcements with a novel data set of unprecedented breadth and length. Data Appendix. More...

#2007-046C "Urban Crime and Labor Mobility"
by Subhayu Bandyopadhyay, Santiago Pinto, and Christopher H. Wheeler
October 2007
Revised August 2009

We present a model of crime where two municipalities exist within a metropolitan statistical area (MSA). Consistent with the literature, local law enforcement has a crime reduction effect and a crime diversion effect. More...

#2007-045C "Human Capital Externalities and Adult Mortality in the U.S."
by Christopher H. Wheeler
October 2007
Revised January 2008

Human capital is now widely recognized to confer numerous benefits, including higher incomes, lower incidence of unemployment, and better health, to those who invest in it. More...