Working Papers

This paper traces the development of school finance policies in Wisconsin and highlights deficiencies in state aid policies and the reliance on untargeted property tax relief as among the chief reasons why Wisconsin has failed to solve its property tax-school funding dilemma.

We analyze the impact of the boom and subsequent collapse in housing prices and the unprecedented surge in mortgage foreclosures on the finances of central cities.

Global current account imbalances have reappeared, although the extent and distribution of these imbalances are noticeably different from those experienced in the middle of the last decade.

For four decades economists have been finding that the forward discount is a very biased forecast of future changes in the exchange rate. The carry trade makes money, on average. For just as long, they …

In a recent CROWE Policy Brief, Noah Williams (2018) argues that the recent increases in Minnesota’s minimum wage relative to Wisconsin’s is a central reason why Minnesota’s employment in limited service restaurants (aka fast food establishments) has declined. 

Purchasing power parity (PPP), the doctrine that prices of goods and services expressed in a common currency are equalized, is described.

Tracking the business cycle at the level of state economies and discerning the impact of fiscal and regulatory policies – as well as nationwide policies – on state economies has been hampered by a limited number of available sets of high frequency indicators. In this paper, we review the data sources and series available for a cross-section of states, with discussion of the associated advantages and disadvantages. We provide estimates of the correlation and comovement of various indicators with state-level real GDP, and how different indicators define turning points in state economies. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of high frequency state-level GDP by evaluating whether a particular state economy is performing in line with expectations.

We re-examine the Fama (1984) puzzle – the finding that ex post depreciation and
interest differentials are negatively correlated, contrary to what theory suggests – for
eight advanced country exchange rates against the US dollar, over the period up to
February 2016. The rejection of the joint hypothesis of uncovered interest parity (UIP)
and rational expectations – sometimes called the unbiasedness hypothesis – still occurs,
but with much less frequency. Strikingly, in contrast to earlier findings, the Fama
regression coefficient is positive and large in the period after the global financial crisis.
However, using survey based measures of exchange rate expectations, we find much
greater evidence in favor of UIP. Hence, the main story for the switch in Fama
coefficients in the wake of the global financial crisis is mostly – but not entirely – a
change in how expectations errors and interest differentials co-move, though the risk
premium also plays a critical role for safe haven currencies (Japanese yen and Swiss
franc).

Despite the growing attention to technology adoption in the economics literature, knowledge gaps remain regarding why some valuable technologies are slow to be adopted. This paper contributes to our understanding of agricultural technology adoption by showing that a focus on yield gains may, in some contexts, be misguided. We study a technology in Ethiopia that has no impact on yields, but that has nonetheless been widely adopted. Using three waves of panel data, we estimate a correlated random coefficient model and calculate the returns to improved chickpea in terms of yields, costs, and prots. We nd that farmers’ comparative advantage does not play a signicant role in their adoption decisions and hypothesize that this is due to the overall high economic returns to adoption, despite the limited yield impacts of the technology. Our results suggest economic measures of returns may be more relevant than increases in yields in explaining technology adoption decisions.