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This paper tests whether a real business cycle model can be built using a specific technological shock, a change in the depreciation rate, instead of an aggregate multiplicative shock. The model cannot duplicate standard business cycle facts.

SUMMARYThis paper examines the distribution of economic research as catalogued in the Journal of Economic Literature across countries of the world and attempts to explain those patterns. We report the number of articles published on each country and estimate a series of regressions to understand this pattern. We find that measures of a country's size (physical and economic), connections with the outside world and data availability explain much of the pattern of research. We also find that tourism receipts, whether English is an official language, and the number of economic research institutions are significantly correlated with the amount of research done on a country. After controlling for all the variables, we find only three regions (all in Africa) with significantly less research published by economists in Journal of Economic Literature cataloged articles than North America.

The results presented in this paper give a comprehensive picture of the extent of publishing by economists. While it is obvious that the traditional emphasis on refereed journal articles captures only a part of economists' research output, to date it has been difficult to determine how large a part of that output was not being measured. This note provides the necessary perspective and presents information on the relative productivity of faculty at different institutional types and with different years of experience.

In the midst of the Great Depression, California engaged in a massive restructuring of its tax system, reducing reliance on the property tax and introducing sales and income taxes. Our analysis suggests that this restructuring, which included a voter referendum, was primarily driven by a desire to change the mix rather than the level of taxation. Nonetheless, by introducing new taxes that had a higher revenue elasticity than the existing taxes, California created a revenue system that allowed the rapid growth of spending to continue.