Geography shapes economic outcomes in a major way. This Paper uses spatial empirical methods to detect and analyse trade patterns in a historical dataset on Chinese rice prices. Our results suggest that spatial features were important for the expansion of interregional trade. Geography dictates,...

This paper is concerned with the influence of agglomeration economies on economic outcomes across British regions. The concentration of economic activity in one place can foster economic performance due to the reduction in transportation costs, the ready availability of customers and suppliers,...

We apply a novel measure of intergenerational mobility (IM) developed by Güell, Rodríguez Mora, and Telmer (2014) to a rich combination of Italian data allowing us to produce comparable measures of IM of income for 103 Italian provinces. We then exploit the large heterogeneity across Italian...

Empirical models of differentiated product demand are widely used by both academics and practitioners. While these methods treat carefully the potential endogeneity of price, until recently they have assumed the number and characteristics of the products offered by firms are exogenous. This...

This paper compares the predictive ability of the factor models of Stock and Watson (2002) and Forni, Hallin, Lippi, and Reichlin (2005) using a large panel of US macroeconomic variables. We propose a nesting procedure of comparison that clarifies and partially overturns the results of similar...

In a large class of hazard models with proportional unobserved heterogeneity, the distribution of the heterogeneity among survivors converges to a gamma distribution. This convergence is often rapid. We derive this result as a general result for exponential mixtures and explore its implications...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

This paper analyzes the effect of having a large gap in firing costs between permanent and temporary workers in a dual labour market on TFP development at the firm level. We propose a simple model showing that, under plausible conditions, both temporary workers' effort and firms' temp-to-perm...

Two separate narratives have emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. One speaks of private financial excess and the key role of the banking system in leveraging and deleveraging the economy. The other emphasizes the public sector balance sheet over the private and worries about the...

Using the Spanish micro data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), we first document how the excessive gap in employment protection between indefinite and temporary workers leads to large differentials in on-the-job training (OTJ) against the latter....