The COVID-19 pandemic generated highly heterogeneous economic effects across territories, reflecting differences in local production structures and spatial organization. This paper examines the geography of short-run economic fragility during the first wave of the pandemic by identifying...

This paper provides an introduction to Double/Debiased Machine Learning (DML). DML is a general approach to performing inference about a target parameter in the presence of nuisance functions: objects that are needed to identify the target parameter but are not of primary interest. Nuisance...

Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller's (2015) analysis of the costs of German reunification is a flagship study for the "synthetic control method" (SCM). Yet three issues can be identified. First, Abadie et al. remove countries that performed poorly in the 1990s from their donor pool, potentially...

In UK data, I document the prevalence of misbeliefs regarding the State Pension eligibility age (SPA) and these misbeliefs’ predictivity of retirement. Exploiting policy variation, I estimate a lifecycle model of retirement in which rationally inattentive households learning about uncertain...