This paper quantifies aggregate productivity in general equilibrium economies where agents with heterogeneous preferences make discrete choices between locations and occupations. We show how the conventional tools of welfare economics, like cost-benefit analysis, can be extended to these...

Older home sellers receive lower returns than younger home sellers. Homes sold by older people have fewer major renovations but higher rates of poor upkeep. Older sellers are also more likely to sell off-MLS ("pocket listings") and to sell to investors, leading to lower prices. These patterns...

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) will likely be the most important technology we have ever developed. Technologies such as electricity, semiconductors, and the internet have been transformative, reshaping economic activity and dramatically increasing living standards throughout the world. In some...

With the diffusion of LLMs between 2022 and 2025, new book releases have tripled, raising a question of AI's impact on book quality. We develop a ratings-based usage measure that is comparable across book release vintages, and we find that the vintages from the AI influx period have lower...

One of the promising opportunities offered by AI to support the decarbonization of electricity grids is to align demand with low-carbon supply. We evaluated the effects of one of the world's largest AI managed EV charging tariffs (a retail electricity pricing plan) using a large-scale natural...

Efforts to move care out of hospitals and into the community face a hard constraint: while most medications can be delivered anywhere, diagnosis is still mostly trapped inside the formal health system--clinics, hospitals, and the people and machines inside them. This is especially binding in...

Audit design invokes a tradeoff between a monitor's local knowledge and their independence from influence. We study this tradeoff in the context of a pilot program in six Chinese provinces in 2016, in which provincial governments were given control over budgeting and personnel decisions for city...

Many experiments study the productivity effects of automation technologies such as generative algorithms. A key test in these experiments relates to inequality: does the technology increase output more for high- or low-skill workers? However, the theoretical content of this empirical test has...

Banks face a dual mandate of raising cheap deposits while avoiding liquidity risk. We propose a novel mechanism whereby banks use portfolio opacity to meet this objective. Specifically, banks choose opaque portfolios to secure cheap long-term funding while trading off insolvency and illiquidity....

We demonstrate that depositor inattention gives rise to banks' deposit market power. Using transaction-level data on millions of U.S. depositors, we document that unscheduled income remains in low-rate accounts much longer than scheduled income, and interpret this reaction-time gap as...