Administrative barriers to social insurance program take-up are pervasive, including in subsidized health insurance. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with Massachusetts' Affordable Care Act marketplace to reduce these barriers and other behavioral frictions. We find that a "check the...

How do the employer and the worker interact during a dismissal? This paper tests whether they cooperate to minimize costs, or instead engage in conflict--i.e., deliberately amplify costs. We leverage a unique feature of the French labor market: an employer and a worker can jointly opt to replace...

"We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by the current and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies...

The paper provides a comparative history of the economic impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. By focussing on the relative price evidence, it is possible to show that the conflict had major economic effects around the world. Britain's control of the seas meant that it was much less...

This paper presents a synopsis of recent NBER studies of the history of corporate governance in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Together, the studies underscore the importance of path dependence, often as...

This paper compares the contribution of R&D to innovation in terms of the various innovation output measures provided by the third Community Innovation Survey (CIS 3) for French manufacturing firms and in terms of accounting for inter-industry innovation differences

This paper attempts to show the importance of history in influencing the structure of corporate ownership in France. The strong concentration of family ownership in France is traced to historical weaknesses in the money and capital markets that forced families to have recourse to self-financing....

Several studies based on US and UK data have used market value as an indicator of the firm''s expected R&D performance. However, there exist no investigations for the continental countries in the European Union, partly because the analysis is complicated by data availability problems. In this...

We examine entry across 113 national markets in 16 different industries using a comprehensive data set of French manufacturing firms. The data are unique in indicating how much each firm exports to each destination. Looking across all manufacturers: (1) Firms differ substantially in export...

In a recent series of articles, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert W. Vishny have argued that countries whose legal systems are based on civil law (especially of French origin) have systematically weaker environments for business than those whose legal...