Central banks around the world are exploring and in some cases even piloting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). CBDCs promise to realize a broad range of new capabilities, including direct government disbursements to citizens, frictionless consumer payment and money-transfer systems, and a...

Using multiple sources, we document a substantial worsening in the mental wellbeing of Australians aged 15-24, as measured by surveys, self-harm hospitalisations and suicide deaths. The shift began around 2007-2010 and is worse for young women than for young men. While several factors could be...

This paper examines how firms in an emerging economy are affected by violence due to drug trafficking. Employing rich longitudinal plant-level data covering all of Mexico from 2005–2010, and using an instrumental variable strategy that exploits plausibly exogenous spatiotemporal variation in...

This paper contributes to the economics of AI by exploring three topics neglected by economists: (i) the notion of a Singularity (and Singleton), (ii) the existential risks that AI may pose to humanity, including that from an extraterrestrial AI in a Dark Forest universe; and (iii) the relevance...

The possibility that artificial extraterrestrial intelligence poses an existential threat to humanity is neglected. It is also the case in economics, where both AI existential risks and the potential long-term consequences of an AGI are neglected. This paper presents a thought experiment to...

We estimate the effects of robot adoption on firm-level and worker-level outcomes in the Netherlands using a large employer-employee panel dataset spanning 2009-2020. Our firm-level results confirm previous findings, with positive effects on value added and hours worked for robot-adopting firms...

We employ employer-employee matched data from Denmark and utilize plausibly exogenous variation in the rise of import competition due to the dismantling of import quotas as China entered the World Trade Organization to show, first, that rising import competition has led to reduced employment in...