AbstractWe show how to use commuting flows to infer the spatial distribution of income within a city. A simple workplace choice model predicts a gravity equation for commuting flows whose destination fixed effects correspond to wages. We implement this…
AbstractWe link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic to anonymized cell phone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay home: county-level me…
AbstractThis paper develops a New Keynesian model featuring financial intermediation, short- and long-term bonds, credit shocks, and scope for unconventional monetary policy. The log-linearized model reduces to four equations: Phillips and IS curves, a…
AbstractWe analyze sectoral labor reallocation and the reversal of urbanization in the United States during the Great Depression. The widespread movement to farms, which serves as a form of migratory insurance during the crisis, is largely toward farms…
AbstractWe investigate underlying sources of the US entrepreneurial ecosystem’s advantage compared to other innovative economies by assessing the benefits that Israeli startups derive from migrating to the United States. Addressing positive sorting int…
AbstractA headline result from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment is that emergency room (ER) utilization increased. A seemingly contradictory result from the Massachusetts health reform is that ER utilization decreased. I reconcile both results by…
AbstractWe study the sources of high end-of-life spending for cancer patients. Even among patients with similar initial prognoses, spending in the year postdiagnosis is over twice as high for those who die within the year than those who survive. Elevat…
AbstractChanges in product characteristics on the extensive margin (the addition of new features and the removal of old ones) are an important and hitherto neglected dimension of quality change. Standard techniques for adjusting price indices for new g…
AbstractWe provide a new measure of automation based on patents and study its employment effects. Classifying all U.S. patents granted between 1976 and 2014 as automation or nonautomation patents, we document a strong rise in the number and share of au…
AbstractCan procedural reforms improve judicial efficiency? And do improvements in judicial efficiency benefit firms? We combine the staggered rollout of a reform that required judges in Senegal to complete pretrials within four months with high-freque…