Time-series analysis of weekly initial claims over 1967–2012 reveal the following: (1) Initial claims are highly seasonal and cyclical, but do not follow a specific trend. Seasonality follows a “W” pattern over the 52 week period. (2) Initial claims are subject to conditional volatility and volatility clustering. The EGARCH and CGARCH specifications provide reasonable representations of the conditional volatility. The former suggests the existence of asymmetries in conditional variance. The latter implies that both permanent and transitory shocks affect volatility, but the effect of permanent shocks is more pronounced. (3) Both models perform well in terms of forecasting as well as within- and out-of-sample model selection criteria.

After 22 seasons of competition, the Arena Football League (AFL) suspended operations in 2009. Play resumed in 2010, but attendance has declined dramatically. We examine the determinants of the demand for tickets to AFL games using data from the league’s first incarnation from 1987 to 2008; we find that the honeymoon effect for first-generation AFL teams was very short. Teams lost about 1,700 fans per game on average in their second year of operation, a sizeable loss given league average of 11,000 fans. Our results also suggest that Major League Baseball (MLB) serves as a direct competitor to the AFL, and this offers insights into why the AFL has struggled in its second incarnation (2010–2012).

Two rules for optimizing economic growth are applied to the United States and Germany. One application is to test both against the Golden Rule of Capital Accumulation, and the other is to measure social investment in the sciences and humanities against Euler’s equation.

The political foundations of economic and financial crises have been examined solely vis-a-vis populist macroeconomic policies, but the political consequences of such economic crises have seldom been discussed in the literature. There have been ten notable political crises and six major economic crises in the last half-century of Turkish history. All political crises in Turkey involved a priori economic slowdown. Some of them even followed economic crises, especially sharp devaluations. Secondly, all political crises had social implications, as they all occurred as a result of severe welfare losses of the civilian and military bureaucracy due to inflation. Thirdly, the nature of political crises has recently changed, as they no longer involve overt military interventions. On the contrary, consecutive coups have enhanced the deepening of democracy, as there is a stronger embrace of civil democracy and hostility against the military intentions by the society. Our research demonstrates that all economic crises have occurred during populist right-wing governments and involved budget deficit problems, while only some of them also involved foreign debt crises. Naturally, all economic crises had political consequences.

The last four election-cycles in the U.S. House of Representatives (2004–2010) witnessed two shifts in political party control of that legislative body—from the Republicans to the Democrats in 2006 and then back to the Republicans in 2010. Nevertheless, U.S. House incumbents of both parties running for re-election tended to enjoy a sizeable advantage over their general-election challengers during the period. The advantage is even greater for incumbents who are members of the leadership, key committees, or have lengthy tenure. Our results show that, ceteris paribus, membership in the House leadership is worth on average 6.8 percentage points towards the incumbent’s expected vote-share, and that membership in either of the two top committees is worth an additional 1.3 such percentage points. A ten-term incumbent can expect another 2.0 percentage points of vote share. Lastly, our results also indicate the existence of a wave effect favoring Democratic incumbents in 2006, and a slightly smaller wave effect favoring Republican incumbents in 2010.

We establish that the Turkish economy underwent a remarkable transformation during the last decade. We identify the underpinnings of this successful transformation as well as the inadequate policies that enabled vulnerabilities to accumulate. Despite improvement in the economic fundamentals, volatility and dependence on external finance not only persisted, but actually increased during the last decade. We discuss the structural causes of the widening external deficit. Finally, we evaluate Turkey’s outstanding economic performance in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the recent soft landing and rebalancing episode.

The Italian classical liberal tradition of Federalism and European integration is well founded. Starting with Luigi Einaudi, who took up the heritage of Carlo Cattaneo, it has continued with Giovanni Malagodi, Giovanni Demaria, and Bruno Leoni, not to mention the liberals of Einaudi’s times. The same reflection continues today. Alberto Alesina is a prominent personality among the scholars who can be considered as full heirs of Einaudi. A foresight, often impressive, is the thread linking Einaudi’s writings on European federation. Between the twenties and the early fifties of the 20th century, Einaudi traced with great precision the profile and many details of a politically and economically unified Europe. Today, we do not have the federation that he wished for, but the economic sovereignty among EU countries has been shared to a great extent. Other prominent Italian liberal thinkers and politicians have reflected on the idea of a federal Europe and on the incipient European construction: thinkers such as Bruno Leoni, Giovanni Malagodi and Giovanni Demaria. Giovanni Malagodi, for many years a member of the Italian Parliament and secretary general of the Italian Liberal party, in his speech for the ratification of the Treaty of Rome, advocated a European monetary union with a single currency substituting those of the Member States of the EEC. Both Giovanni Demaria and Bruno Leoni warned against the danger of Government interventionist policies in the European common market. Alesina, in various scholarly contributions on European integration and in the essay The Future of Europe, adopts a liberal perspective for his critical analysis of EU policies.

Changes in the mortgage industry have been swiftly effected over the past few years. Many of the changes have come about as a response to the high level of observed delinquencies and defaults on residential mortgages as house prices plummeted, and others have evolved from continuing concerns about the treatment of borrowers during the mortgage origination process. The segmented mortgage industry of the early part of the decade, with loans being originated in the prime, subprime and government mortgage sectors, has been largely replaced with a bifurcated system. By year end 2010, the FHA/VA (government sector) combined with the conventional, conforming market share of originations was 90.8 %. In this paper, we examine some of the observed trends and changes in the types and levels of broker compensation that existed before the regulatory change that brought about the implementation of the Federal Reserve Board’s (FRB) new loan officer compensation rule. Among other questions, we examine the variance in broker compensation across geographies, across lenders, across borrower types, and across loan products. The intent of this ex post analysis is to provide an understanding of the potential impacts of the declining broker industry on both access to mortgage loans and on the pricing of mortgage originations.

Using data covering every child born in California from 1961 to 2000, Fryer and Levitt (2004) find that in the 1960s, the differences in name choices by blacks and whites were relatively small, but that a profound shift began among blacks in the mid-1970s toward more distinctively black names, especially among blacks in racially isolated neighborhoods. As an extension of Fryer and Levitt (2004), this study uses data on the names of about 1,300 white children born over the four-year period from 1997 to 2000 and living in a segment of a Metropolitan Statistical Area in the Deep South, and finds that use of combination first names—largely based on combinations of single names included among the names of high-end white children from Fryer and Levitt (2004) and Levitt and Dubner (2005)—is significantly more prevalent among high-end white children than it is among low-end white children. Unlike the data described in Fryer and Levitt (2004), which support an Identity Model wherein distinctively black names result from the Black Power movement that encouraged blacks to “accentuate and affirm black culture and fight the claims of black inferiority,” the present study suggests that high-end parents may use the combination first name convention to increase the likelihood of the child’s future success in various partnership markets, such as dating, marriage and business-partnership markets.