I study how motivation shapes own and peers’ educational success. Using data from Project STAR, I find that academic … motivation in early elementary school, as measured by a standardized psychological test, predicts contemporaneous and future test … motivation does not affect longer-term educational success, likely because it does not change own motivation …

price shocks. Following a migrant inflow, labor costs decline and employment expands. Labor productivity decreases sharply … migration mostly benefits low- productivity firms within locations. As migrants select into high-productivity destinations …, migration however strongly contributes to the equalization of factor productivity across locations …

suggests a negative effect on total factor productivity. Using newly collected longitudinal data on pensioners, we quantify … pensioner-worker ratio decreases factor productivity by 5-6%. The effect is stronger when production is labor intensive and …

Why do cities differ so much in productivity? We document that most of the measured dispersion in productivity across … US cities is spurious and reflects granularity bias: idiosyncratic heterogeneity in plant-level productivity and size …

productivity differences and internal trade frictions. We show that even in the absence of the typical externalities studied in the … relative to that chosen by a planner. In particular, optimal urbanization exceeds decentralized levels when productivity … closer to optimal policies than decentralized allocations whenever productivity differences in non-traded sectors are either …

Conflicts between management and workers are common and can have significant impacts on productivity. We study how … productivity of surviving workers. Moreover, it is specifically the firing of peers with whom workers had social connections …

We study the impact of techies—engineers and other technically trained workers—on firm-level productivity. We first …-neutral productivity in both manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries. We find that techies raise firm-level productivity, and this … of techies on productivity operates mostly through ICT and other techies, not R&D workers. Engineers have a greater …

We study the relationship between outside options and workers’ motivation to exert effort. We evaluate changes in …