This paper uses a large sample of survey data to investigate the empirical determinants of coupon usage. The broad set of control variables allows for comparisons of the relative importance of individual determinants and groups of determinants. We find that the set of variables measuring consumer shopping habits and attitudes explains more of the variation in coupon usage across households than the group of socioeconomic and demographic variables. However, the latter variables are jointly significant, and their estimated coefficients have the expected signs.

At the national level, trade-weighted real exchange rates and foreign incomes significantly impact exports. At the subnational level, these variables are generally insignificant in the few studies that include them. We argue that the standard use of national trade weights in the construction of subnational trade-weighted averages of exchange rates and foreign incomes is inappropriate, and we then construct these variables using state-specific trade weights. In our panel data analysis of state-level manufacturing exports, these variables enter significantly and with the expected signs. Also, their out-of-sample forecasting ability is significantly better than that of the national tradeweighted variables.

This paper contradicts previous findings of a lack of relationship between government spending and long run economic growth. The paper argues that government spending has several opposing effects on growth. I focus on one of these, ‘relative wage effects,’ involving the human capital intensity of government spending. The paper constructs two rough measures of this variable for a diverse cross‐section of countries, and uses them to disentangle relative wage effects from other effects of government spending. The paper finds that, after netting out relative wage effects, government spending is positively correlated with growth across countries. Furthermore, as the theory predicts, relative wage effects appear to be empirically important in countries where (a) government spending comprises a sufficiently large share of aggregate spending, and (b) government spending is particularly human capital‐intensive.