Historically, lenders have been accused of “redlining” minority neighborhoods as well as refusing to lend to minority applicants. Considerable bank regulation is designed to prevent both actions. However, the strong correlation between race and neighborhood makes it difficult to distinguish the impact of geographic discrimination from the effects of racial discrimination. Previous studies have failed to untangle these two influences, in part, because of severe omitted variable bias. The data set in this paper allows the distinct effects of race and geography to be identified, and it shows that the evidence for redlining is weak.

This paper examines the impact of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86), which included an expansion of the earned income tax credit, on the labor force participation and hours of work of single women with children. We identify the impact of TRA86 by comparing the change in labor supply of single women with children to the change for single women without children. We find that between 1984–1986 and 1988–1990, single women with children increased their relative labor force participation by up to 2.8 percentage points. We observe no change in the relative hours worked by single women with children who were already in the labor force.

Building on earlier work by Eichengreen and Sachs, we use data for 22 countries to study the role of wage stickiness in propagating the Great Depression. Recent research suggests that monetary shocks, transmitted internationally by the gold standard, were a major cause of the Depression. Accordingly, we use money supplies and other aggregate demand shifters as instruments to identify aggregate supply relationships. We find that nominal wages adjusted quite slowly to falling prices, and that the resulting increases in real wages depressed output. These findings leave open the question of why wages were so inertial in the face of extreme labor market conditions.

We develop a framework for quantifying the amount of risk sharing among states in the United States, and construct data that allow us to decompose the cross-sectional variance in gross state product into several components which we refer to as levels of smoothing. We find that 39 percent of shocks to gross state product are smoothed by capital markets, 13 percent are smoothed by the federal government, and 23 percent are smoothed by credit markets. The remaining 25 percent are not smoothed. We also decompose the federal government smoothing into subcategories: taxes, transfers, and grants to states.

The high variance of crime rates across time and space is one of the oldest puzzles in the social sciences; this variance appears too high to be explained by changes in the exogenous costs and benefits of crime. We present a model where social interactions create enough covariance across individuals to explain the high cross-city variance of crime rates. This model provides an index of social interac-tions which suggests that the amount of social interactions is highest in petty crimes, moderate in more serious crimes, and almost negligible in murder and rape. Quelquefois aussi le crime prend sa source dans l'esprit d'imitation, que l'homme possede 'a un haut degre et qu'il manifeste en toutes choses [A. Quetelet 1835]. I.

Capital investment decisions must recognize the limitations on the firm's ability to later sell or expand capacity. This paper shows how opportunities for future expansion or contraction can be valued as options, how their valuation relates to the q theory of investment, and their effect on the incentive to invest. Generally, the option to expand reduces the incentive to invest, while the option to disinvest raises it. We show how these options determine the effect of uncertainty on investment, how they are changed by shifts of the distribution of future profitability, and how the q-theory and option pricing approaches are related.