The Supreme Court's decision in Verizon v. Trinko, especially in relying on regulation to justify limiting the scope of antitrust enforcement, contradicts both the outcome in U.S. v. AT&T twenty years ago and the theory ...

A recent dramatic rise in subprime foreclosures has led to calls for restrictions against a range of loan features loosely termed “predatory.” Several cities and states have enacted regulations to curb predatory practices, ...

We examine bank-level changes in the relationship between earnings and loan loss provisioning, a measure of earnings management, following the tightening of accounting constraints associated with the SEC's 1998 SunTrust ...

In this dissertation, I use historical patent data and natural experiments to show how policies and institutions affect invention. Chapter 1 shows that establishing new colleges causes 33% more patents per year in places ...

Robert Fogel was one of the earliest and most forceful advocates for the use of quantitative methods and economic theory in the study of economic history and long-term economic change. He demonstrated through his work on ...

We examine the relationships between ownership structure and both earnings and risk-taking among community banks before, during, and after the US financial crisis. We find that publicly-held small community banks had lower ...

I analyze the importance of the local environment on the direction and subsequent diffusion of agricultural innovations. By comparing counties that are near and far from land grant colleges using a variety of distance ...

To estimate the local effect of establishing land grant colleges, I compare locations that receive a land grant college to “runner-up” counties that were in contention to receive the land grant but did not for as-good-as-random ...