AbstractThis paper studies how the expansion of segregated neighborhoods eroded black wealth in prewar American cities. Using a novel sample of matched addresses, we find that over a single decade rental prices soared by roughly 50% on city blocks that…
AbstractWe study the removal of information from a market, such as a job-applicant screening tool. We characterize how removal harms groups with relative advantage in that information: typically those for whom the banned information is most precise rel…
AbstractIn this paper, we investigate the economic consequences of mass shootings. We find that shootings have negative effects on targeted counties’ economies. Estimates using three different comparison groups yield similar results. Examining the mech…
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&…