An I(2) analysis of inflation and the markup is undertaken for the G7 economies and Australia. We find that the levels of prices and costs are best described as I(2) processes and that, except for Japan, a linear combination of the log levels of prices and costs cointegrate to the markup that is integrated of order 1. It is also shown that the markup in each case co-integrates with inflation and that higher inflation is associated with a lower markup in the long run.

This paper provides empirical evidence on macroeconomic complementarities, a restriction on the nature of interaction between individuals in a multi-agent setting. These models imply that activities across agents will be positively correlated, that discrete decisions will be synchronized and that disturbances will be magnified and propagated. The paper shows that these implications are consistent with aggregate observations as well as some microeconomic evidence. Further, looking at certain historical episodes, such as the NIRA, as well as seasonal fluctuations provides additional support for models with macroeconomic complementarities.

We extend our 1985 test of restrictions on Layson and Seaks' (1984) Box-Cox difference transformation to models with autoregressive terms and moving average errors. The tests are based on the Lagrange Multiplier principle. Several empirical examples are given.

Wolf demonstrates that trade within the United States appears substantially impeded by state borders. We revisit this finding with improved data. We show that much intranational home bias can be explained by wholesaling activity. Shipments by wholesalers are much more localized within states than shipments from manufacturing establishments. Controlling for relative prices and the use of actual, rather than imputed, shipment distances also reduces home bias estimates.

We investigate how the presence of a college affects local educational attainment. As counterfactuals for current college locations, we use historical “runner-up” locations that were strongly considered to become college sites but were ultimately not chosen. We find that winning counties today have college degree attainment rates 56% higher than runner-up counties and more private-sector employment in human-capital-intensive industries. These effects are not driven primarily by recent in-migration of educated adults, and alternative public investments did not have similar effects on local educational attainment. The results indicate that colleges played an important role in shaping long-run local outcomes.

We use a novel identification strategy to investigate whether regional universities make their local economies more resilient. Our strategy is based on state governments using similar site-selection criteria to assign normal schools (to train teachers) and insane asylums between 1830 and 1930. Normal schools became larger regional universities while asylum properties mostly continue as small state-owned psychiatric health facilities. We find that a regional university roughly offsets the negative effects of manufacturing exposure. We show the resilience of regional public university spending is an important mechanism, and we show correlations consistent with bachelor’s degree share also playing a mediating role.