I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The...

We present a new dynamic model of corporate investment in imperfectly-competitive product markets, extending the neoclassical (Q) theory of capital to a multi-firm, multi-product, fullystructural model. Our model embeds a state-of-the-art hedonic demand system, endogenizes firms' markups and...

We study how federal information-collection requirements affect public infrastructure spending of local governments. Exploiting the introduction and revision of the federal survey on highway infrastructure, we find that county roads that are randomly sampled by the survey attract more local...

We examine how people think and speak about the history of race in the United States. Based on 14,033 surveys, we document substantial ideological divides in views about the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, and slavery's legacy, with pronounced differences among white respondents. The...

Economic inequality remains a persistent and widely studied issue in the social sciences. South Korea provides a striking example where the top 23 business groups, controlled by ultra-wealthy, family-owned conglomerates (chaebols), have maintained significant economic persistence and resisted...

Since 1972, the General Social Survey has periodically asked whether people are happy with Yes, Maybe or No type answers. Here I use a net "happiness" measure, which is percentage Yes less percentage No with Maybe treated as zero. Average happiness is around +20 on this scale for all respondents...

Most social media users have encountered harassment online, but there is scarce evidence of how this type of toxic content impacts engagement. In a pre-registered browser extension field experiment, we randomly hid toxic content for six weeks on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Lowering exposure...

We use a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model of international investment and production to in vestigate the real implications of the last five decades of financial globalization. We introduce a wedge accounting framework to estimate country- and time-varying measures of outward and inward...

Private equity, an industry characterized by high-stake investments and complex contractual arrangements, operates almost entirely outside of courts. Despite the substantial financial stakes involved - billions of dollars locked in for years - and the potential for fiduciary conflicts,...