6 10 16 23 28 36 44 56 64 4 T here continues to be considerable discussion regarding the vital roles that good schools and a well-educated population play in promoting sound, local economic and community development activities. Certainly, it is commonsense that quality schools produce good citizens and skilled workers, and that employers are attracted to places having highly-educated labor. Rec...

1 Introduction The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of community matching, one of the methods we will use to analyze the economic impacts of gaming venues in Massachusetts. 1 Community matching involves selecting a group of communities that are economically and demographically similar to the casino host communities in Massachusetts. Once casinos open in Massachusetts, comparisons...

Uncertainty about how the economy will evolve is a key concern for households and firms. People’s views on how likely it is that the economy will be growing, stagnating, or in recession help shape the actions they ncertainty about how the economy will evolve is a key concern for households and firms. People’s views on how likely it is that the economy will be growing, stagnating, or in recessio...

The Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute measure economic freedom in nations using indices with ten and five indicators respectively. Eight of the Heritage indicators and four of the Fraser-indicators are about specific types of institutional quality, like rule of law, the protection of property, and the provision of sound money. More of these is considered to denote more economic freed...

In many circumstances economic agents are partially ignorant about payoff-relevant state variables, but must nonetheless decide what action to take. To give just one example, investment decisions must often be made without full knowledge of the rate of return. In many such cases, agents can potentially obtain useful information by observing either the actions of other agents, or market prices. ...

This paper examines both the in-sample and out-of-sample performance of three monetary fundamental models of exchange rates and compares their out-of-sample performance to that of a simple Random Walk model. Using a data-set consisting of five currencies at monthly frequency over the period January 1980 to December 2009 and a battery of newly developed performance measures, the paper shows that...

Multiresolution wavelet analysis is a natural way to decompose economic time series into components of various frequencies: long-run trend, business-cycle component, and high frequency noise. This paper illustrates the method on real GNP and inflation. The business-cycle component of the wavelet-filtered series closely resembles the series filtered by the approximate bandpass filter (Baxter and...

BACKGROUND Health plans may achieve cost savings by limiting the daily average consumption (DACON) of certain medications and encouraging members and prescribers to select lower cost dosing options. Various strengths of a given medication may be similarly priced per unit; therefore, a single unit of a higher-strength medication may cost less than multiple lower-strength units that provide the s...