How does population aging affect economic growth and factor shares in times of increasingly automatable production processes? The present paper addresses this question in a new macroeconomic model of automation where competitive firms perform tasks to produce output. Tasks require labor and...

Cloud computing enables a shift in the costs of ICT adoption from investment in fixed capital to pay-on-demand services allowing firms to scale and reorganize. Using new firm-level data we examine the impact of cloud on firm growth, using zip-code-level instruments of the timing of high-speed...

In the past several decades, the U.S. economy has witnessed a number of striking trends that indicate a rising market concentration and a slowdown in business dynamism. In this paper, we make an attempt to understand potential common forces behind these empirical regularities through the lens of...

In this paper, we review the literature on declining business dynamism and its implications in the United States and propose a unifying theory to analyze the symptoms and the potential causes of this decline. We first highlight 10 pronounced stylized facts related to declining business dynamism...

We use the UK Labor Force survey to investigate whether the socio-economic outcomes of people born on the 13th day of the month, and of those born on Friday the 13th, differ from the outcomes of people born on more auspicious days. In many European countries, including the UK, such days are...

In this paper, we study the development and underlying drivers of skill premiums in Germany between 1980 and 2008. We show that the significant increase in the medium to low skill wage premiums since the late 1980s was almost exclusively concentrated among the group of workers aged 30 or below....

This paper examines the effects of demographic change on public finances in a federal system. We develop a simple methodical procedure to measure the effect of demographic changes on public revenues and expenditures. We apply our method to the local, state and federal government sector as well...