AbstractWe assess the predictive power of survey measures of social capital with a new behavioral data set that examines whether citizens report a lost wallet to its owner. Using data from more than 17,000 lost wallets across 40 countries, we find that…
AbstractWe provide a method to track the active prevalence of COVID-19 in real time, correcting for time-varying sample selection in symptom-based testing data and incomplete tracking of recovered cases and fatalities. Our method only requires publicly…
AbstractThis paper uses new data on the removal of local, sector-specific barriers to firm entry across 1,800 municipalities in Peru to estimate the impact on firm productivity and markups. New legislation in 2013 strengthened the national competition …
AbstractWe investigate the impact of peer interaction on the quality of financial decision making in a laboratory experiment. Face-to-face communication with a randomly assigned peer significantly improves the quality of subsequent private decisions ev…
AbstractWe estimate the impact of firm-level automation on individual worker outcomes by combining Dutch microdata with a direct measure of automation expenditures covering all private nonfinancial sector firms. Using a novel difference-in-differences …
AbstractFirms’ success in international markets depends on their product’s quality, prices, markups, and marginal cost. However, causally identified empirical evidence for the effect of trade policies that address nontariff barriers on these mechanisms…
AbstractWe examine the impact of government funding for R&D—and defense-related R&D in particular—on privately conducted R&D and its ultimate effect on productivity growth. We estimate longitudinal models that relate privately funded R&…
AbstractThis paper analyzes gender differences in working patterns and wages on Amazon Mechanical Turk, a popular online labor platform. Using information on 2 million tasks, we find no gender differences in task selection nor experience. Nonetheless, …
AbstractWe analyze the impact of Covid-19 on productivity using data from an innovative monthly firm survey that asks for quantitative impacts of Covid-19 on inputs and outputs. We find that total factor productivity (TFP) fell by up to 6% during 2020–…
AbstractExport promotion at the extensive margin is a key concern of governments. We develop measures of how far firms in origin sectors are from break-even entry in destination markets. The measure is based on Almost Ideal gravity featuring heterogene…