The literature on patent buyouts has focused on single-economy settings, where buyouts are welfare improving relative to patents unless there are frictions such as imperfect information or commitment problems. We expand the analysis to a world with two heterogeneous countries featuring different...

This study investigates whether eligibility for antiretroviral therapy (ART) of HIV positive parents improved their children's educational attainment in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, employing a regression discontinuity design. We find that there is a positive impact of ART eligibility on...

Several country-level studies have identified long-term adverse effects of in-utero exposure to the 1918 influenza pandemic (also known as the Spanish Flu) on economic outcomes. In-utero conditions are theoretically linked to adult health and socio-economic status through the fetal origins...

We investigate how politico-economic factors shaped government responses to the spread of COVID-19. Our simple framework uses epidemiological, economic and politico-economic arguments. Confronting the theory with US state level data we find strong evidence for partisanship even when we control...

Evidence from monetary VARs for ten countries points towards an unfavorable trade-off between leaning against credit fluctuations and stabilizing real economic activity. Results are robust both across countries, and based on two alternative approaches, i.e. either (i) focusing on the impact of...

The endowment and attachment effect are empirically well-documented in bilateral trade situations. Yet, the theoretical literature has so far failed to formally identify these effects. We ftll this gap by introducing expectations-based loss aversion, which can explain both effects, into the...

In dynamic promotion contests, where performance measurement is noisy and ordinal, selection can be improved by biasing later stages in favor of early leaders. Even in the worst-case scenario, where noise swamps ability differences in determining relative performance, optimal bias is i) strictly...

This paper provides a novel theory of research joint ventures for financially constrained firms. When firms choose R&D portfolios, an RJV can help to coordinate research efforts, reducing investments in duplicate projects. This can free up resources, increase the variety of pursued projects and...

We analyze the impact of credit default on individual trajectories. Using a proprietary dataset for the years 2004-2020, we find that after default individuals relocate to cheaper areas. Importantly, default has long-lasting negative effects on income, credit score, total credit limit, and...

We analyze how earnings dynamics changed in the US after the financial crisis of 2007- 2009. Differently from most models for earnings mobility, we allow persistence patters to depend semi-nonparametrically on both the past individual position in the distribution and on a set of individual-level...