
Gary A. HooverTulane University | TU · The Murphy Institute
Gary A. Hoover
PhD
About
74
Publications
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Introduction
Gary "Hoov" Hoover currently is the Executive Director of the Murphy Institute and Professor of Economics at Tulane University. Hoov does research on income inequality/redistribution, public finance and ethics in the economics profession.
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (74)
In this study, we investigate the effects of corruption on the inequality of opportunity between Blacks and Whites, which is the main cause of economic inequality between these two racial groups. To our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the relationship between the two. Using data from U.S. counties we find that corruption, in fact,...
While the Chinese government's stated position is to support religious freedom, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is officially atheist. Individuals who profess faith are typically unable to join and members who practice a religion face expulsion and a loss of benefits. This paper analyzes the extent to which the CCP's policies regarding religion m...
We use recently developed difference-in-differences methodologies and a panel of US states over the period 1960–2015 to examine how bank branching deregulation impacted state-level income inequality. Existing research relying on traditional two-way fixed effects estimates and event studies provide mixed results. However, these results potentially s...
This paper uses a unique data set and a natural experiment to test if electoral fraud can exist in late-arriving votes. On the night of the 2019 Bolivian elections, the official vote counting system that was expected to publish the results real-time, suddenly stopped. When it resumed, the results had flipped. We estimate several difference-in-diffe...
This research observes the dearth of Black economists who have ever held positions in the leadership of the Eastern Economic Association, the Southern Economic Association, the Midwest Economics Association, or the Western Economic Association International. It also records the number of Black economists to ever hold positions of editor or be membe...
We investigate the effects of three structural macroeconomic shocks (monetary, demand, and supply) on the labor market outcomes of black and white Americans using a factor‐augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) framework with 136 U.S. macroeconomic indicators from 1973 to 2017. Our results indicate that adverse macroeconomic shocks have differenti...
Recently in economics there has been discussion of how to increase diversity in the profession and how to improve the work life of diverse peoples. We conducted surveys and interviews with Black, Latinx and Native American people. These groups have long been underrepresented in the economics profession. Participants were at various stages along the...
ABSTRACT: This paper exploits a natural experiment based on a disruption in the official preliminary vote counting system to identify and estimate the size of electoral fraud in the 2019 Bolivian presidential elections. The results show evidence of a statistically significant electoral case of fraud that increased the votes of the incumbent Movimie...
Using a panel of US states over the period 1985–2010, we examine how Democratic governors affect economic freedom compared to Republican governors. Economic freedom is measured using the Economic Freedom of North America Index. Given the emphasis that this index places on smaller government, we expect that having a Democratic governor leads to less...
This research presents the results of a survey regarding scientific misconduct and questionable research practices elicited from a sample of 1215 management researchers. We find that misconduct (research that was either fabricated or falsified) is not encountered often by reviewers nor editors. Yet, there is a strong prevalence of misrepresentation...
Using data from the Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration, we examine whether political ideology and political alignment a�ect how much a state receives in per-capita highway funding. For the period 1994 { 2008, we �nd evidence that Republican-dominated House of Representatives delegations received more highway funding per c...
Because of historically unprecedented increases in the prison population since the late 1970s, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Using Becker's (1968) framework on crime, this study investigates the causal relationship between incarceration rates and state minimum wages. Our identification strategy consists of a sta...
The question of how financial development affects economic inequality is a subject of much debate. This paper adds to this literature by examining whether banking deregulation affects income inequality using state-level data from the United States from the late 20th century. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that the deregulation of interstate b...
This research presents the results of a follow-up survey to journal editors more than a decade after Enders and Hoover (Journal of Economic Literature 42(3):487–93). The original survey asked editors about their definition of plagiarism and known cases. This work investigates what, if anything, has changed in regards to how journal editors react to...
We survey 1215 management researchers, including editors, researchers, and reviewers, about their views and experiences with four types of academic misconduct: plagiarism, self-plagiarism, coercive citations, and questionable reviewing practices. Management researchers hold strict views on plagiarism, though editors report on frequent instances enc...
Research on the distribution of federal expenditures has provided mixed evidence showing that states with more legislators who belong to the president’s party and states with more legislators in the chamber majority tend to receive a larger allocation of federal funds. We add to this research by considering how political polarization and political...
Within the field of public economics, there is the perception that Republicans are associated with ‘small government’ and Democrats with ‘big government’. We test this notion by examining whether economic freedom is affected when a single party is in control of the state legislature. We find no link between party control and our main economic freed...
Using household-level data from 1980 to 2010, we examine whether economic freedom, as measured by the Economic Freedom of North America Index, has similar effects on white household income as it does on black household income. Our findings suggest that the positive effect of economic freedom found in most studies affects black households less than...
Objectives
With increasing attention being paid to inequality and poverty, this article attempts to shed light on mechanisms by which the poor arrive at decisions that are suboptimal and lead to “poverty traps.”
Methods
We design a laboratory experiment in which we induce wealth and income differences between subjects to compare their behavior in...
Using state-level data from 1980-2010 we examine whether economic freedom, as measured by the Economic Freedom of North America Index, has had any impact in increasing or decreasing the ratio of median income for black households to the median income of white households. To our knowledge, there has been no research on racial income disparities and...
This article reinvestigates the relationship between real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and terrorism. We devise a terrorism Lorenz curve to show that domestic and transnational terrorist attacks are each more concentrated in middle-income countries, thereby suggesting a nonlinear income–terrorism relationship. Moreover, this point of con...
Research on the distribution of federal expenditures has provided mixed evidence showing that states with more legislators who belong to the president's party and states with more legislators in the chamber majority tend to receive a larger allocation of federal funds. We add to this research by considering how political polarization and political...
In this paper we explore the impact of elected and appointed county commission executives on expenditures and employment opportunities. Political pandering could mean that elected officials behave in a manner that is distinctly different from their appointed counter parts. In addition, we explore whether there is any appreciable difference when ele...
Using US state-level economic freedom measures, we investigate the extent that changes in economic freedom affect US State income growth. More importantly, we study how this effect differs across income quintiles, allowing us to address the particularly timely question of who benefits from increases in economic freedom and who does not. Our results...
In spite of the common wisdom that poverty breeds terrorism, in their meta-study, Gassebner and Luechinger (2011) report that the two robust explanatory variables for terrorism are population and various measures of democratic freedom , but not per capita GDP. Their results from 13.4 million different regressions estimated using various combination...
In this study, the authors investigate the income inequality responses of Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics in the United States to the income maintenance program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) using cross sections of state-level data. The results show that this program indeed reduces income inequality but the impacts are not uniform ac...
This work examines the level of income inequality of immigrants to the United States. We separately examine income inequality of males and females using several different inequality measures for robustness. The work finds that males have the traditional inverted “U” relationship between inequality and growth but females have the opposite. These dif...
In this study we investigate the differences in income inequality among different racial/ethnic groups in the United States
using both personal and household income. We find that income inequality is negatively related to the percentage of males
but that the impact is muted for blacks as opposed to whites or Hispanics. In addition, we find income...
This paper investigates the impact of various socio-economic variables on various cohorts of the income distribution. We use asymmetric cointegration tests to show that unemployment and immigration shocks have real impacts on income inequality. In addition, using threshold test results we are able to show that positive and negative shocks to the ec...
"Since many smokers begin consuming tobacco products in their adolescent years, many states have adopted a variety of restrictions on youth access to tobacco, which studies show reduces the demand for tobacco among this cohort. This paper takes a different track by addressing the demand for youth access restrictions. Specifically, using a random ef...
This article explores the differences in student performance outcomes when school officials are either elected or appointed to their posts. If appointed officials are insulated by at least one level of bureaucracy, they might be more inclined to implement unpopular policies to impact student performance. Findings indicate that there are no differen...
This paper integrates survey data on economists' experiences and perceptions of plagiarism with a game-theoretic model of author strategies to investigate whether information is being efficiently transmitted within the profession. The surveys reveal editorial misperceptions of the nature of plagiarism (e.g., plagiarism versus copyright infringement...
With the election of 1994, the Republican party gained control of both houses of the U.S. Congress for the first time since 1954. In this paper, we analyze whether this change in party control had significant effects on the determinants of federal spending at the state level. To perform this analysis, we utilize panel data on federal spending, at t...
We use Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR), to explore the impact of three different measures of economic activity – growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), unemployment, and manufacturing employment – on poverty among whites, blacks and Hispanics in the United States. This analysis is unique in that we further disag- gregate the data, by loo...
The authors explore a difficult problem in academic publishing. Their survey turns up serious concerns about academic plagiarism. One conclusion is that there are no clear guidelines by which to develop a code of ethics.
Although numerous studies have examined the effect of clean indoor-air laws on tobacco consumption, a handful of other studies have sought to address the demand for smoking restrictions. This paper adds to this body of research by using a random effects Probit procedure that controls for the endogeneity of cigarette consumption and cigarette taxes...
Although numerous studies have examined the effect of clean indoor‐air laws on tobacco consumption, a handful of other studies have sought to address the demand for smoking restrictions. This paper adds to this body of research by using a random effects Probit procedure that controls for the endogeneity of cigarette consumption and cigarette taxes...
The damage to a reputation has long been viewed as the main and most effective deterrent against plagiarism among professional economists. We show that it is rational for individuals in the economics profession who want to plagiarize to engage in this activity given current incentives. Recent research concerning plagiarism in the economics professi...
Consider a collection of isolated or autarkic regions. The original residents or natives of each region are by assumption a group with a welfare function defined over group members' consumption. Now suppose the regions form a common labor market and a federal government, and one type from each group can freely migrate to other regions. Under what c...
It has been shown that states with higher per capita senate representation have higher federal spending per capita (Atlas, C. M., Gilligan, T. A., Hendershott, R. J. and Zupan, M. A. (1995). American Economic Review 85: 624–629). With a more recent data sample, more highly disaggregated data and a different set of political control variables, we ar...
This paper documents the historical trend of higher poverty rates in the South compared to the rest of the country. It examines any differences that might exist in how the poverty population in the country as a whole and the poverty population in the South respond to different economic and demographic factors. Economic factors such as unemployment...
In recent years a great deal of time and resources have been devoted to understanding poverty in general and elderly poverty in particular. This paper uses a panel data set spanning the years 1980–2001 to investigate the impact of certain economic and demographic factors on overall, non-elderly, and elderly poverty. We also investigate the robustne...
This paper investigates the impact of economic growth, and more specifically robust economic growth along with other macroeconomic determinants, on poverty levels using both the U.S. official measure of poverty and an estimated time series of Sen indices of poverty. The results reveal that the period of robust economic expansion that the U.S. econo...
This paper reports the results of a survey regarding the instances of plagiarism reported by journal editors in the economics profession. The survey finds that nearly 24% of responding editors encounter one case of plagiarism in a typical year. In addition, the survey reveals that less than 19% of responding journals have a formal policy regarding...
We examine the labor-cost savings associated with privatization by comparing earnings and employment trends of public and private sector refuse workers. Findings suggest that high union earnings for workers in the public sector are a source of labor-cost savings in the refuse industry. Evidence on job changers does not indicate that earnings for th...
Previous research has shown that economic growth should help to reduce the rate of poverty. However, a number of recent studies have found that the economic expansion of the 1980s had no statistically significant effect on aggregate poverty. It is shown that both a Threshold regression and a Fourier approximation provide a better empirical model of...
This article examines the influence that certain publicly and privately funded programs have on state-level cigarette tax setting behavior. The article finds that the impact of Project ASSIST (a federally sponsored program designed to decrease cigarette consumption) has had a marginal impact on taxes in selected states in the United States. In addi...
The authors first establish a benchmark for the relationship between poverty rates among family types and unemployment rates in the 1980s and 1990s. The authors then discuss possible reasons for the differences in responsiveness of family poverty to unemployment rates that this benchmark suggests.
This paper examines the impact that demographics have on policy outcomes. The impact that aldermanic ward-level demographics have on the number of liquor licenses is measured in two US cities. In one city there is a great deal of direct resident involvement in the issuance process, while in the other city, issuance decisions are handled by elected...
This paper examines the entry-level labor market for academic economists and investigates the determinants of market salaries. The focus is on the effects of tenure and nontenure track jobs and departmental ranking that are based upon faculty research productivity. The results reveal that the market works differently depending upon whether the hiri...
This paper estimates the income gap rations and Gini coefficients of poor Americans and combines them with official U.S. government poverty statistics to create a new time series of Sen indices of poverty. The effects of growth and other determinants of aggregate poverty are investigated for the period of 1961-1996. Holding other determinants of po...
This paper estimates income gap ratios and Gini coefficients of poor Americans and combines them with official U.S. government poverty statistics to create a new time series of Sen indices of poverty. The effects of growth and other determinants of aggregate poverty are investigated over the period 1961-1996. The results indicate that economic grow...
This paper examines the characteristics of entry level academic economists and investigates the determinants of market salaries. Contrary to what might be expected we find that nominal salaries are not systematically adjusted to reflect observable differences in the cost of living and salary premiums are not paid to entry-level economists hired int...
Consider a group of isolated or autarkic regions. If the regions from a federation, on expects to see greater efficiency in production at the cost of reduced local control over the distribution of consumption. Under what circumstances is this tradoff even potentially beneficial to all regions?
Using Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR) we explore the impact of three different measures of economic activity - GDP growth, unemployment, and manufacturing employment - on poverty among whites, blacks and Hispanics in the United States. This analysis is unique in that we further disaggregate the data by looking at the impact of growth across r...
This paper reports the results of a survey regarding academic plagiarism in the economics profession. We received 1208 usable responses from a broad cross-section of economists. As in our previous survey of journal editors, there is substantial variance in what is considered plagiarism and in the appropriate response to a clear case of plagiarism....