AbstractWe study how political hierarchy shapes regional development in China, using variations driven by regime changes during the 1000–2000 C.E. period. We find that changes in the status of the provincial capital led to the rise and decline of diffe…
AbstractThis paper investigates the extent to which state-level differences in business taxes influence the location decisions of multiestablishment firms. Each state in the United States administers their own unemployment insurance program, and cross-…
AbstractInflation expectations and the associated pass-through of oil price shocks depend on demand and supply conditions underlying the global oil market. We establish this result using a structural VAR model of the global oil market that jointly iden…
AbstractWhile recent work suggests democracy does cause growth, the channels through which this effect occurs remain unclear. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the timing of district-level political regime changes induced by the collapse of Presiden…
AbstractWe show that New Keynesian models with frictionless labor supply face a challenge: given standard parameters, they cannot simultaneously match plausible estimates of marginal propensities to consume (MPCs), marginal propensities to earn (MPEs),…
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…