An industrial policy of subsidizing physical capital investment has been utilized in many countries in order to encourage export growth and spread economic development to outlying areas. For Israel, we possess a unique time series-cross section micro data set that details investment and its...

This paper estimates and evaluates the contributions of R&D tax incentives and publicly financed R&D investment policies in promoting growth of output and privately funded R&D investment in US manufacturing industries. Publicly financed R&D induces cost savings but crowds out privately-financed...

Does industrial policy work? This is a subject of long-standing debates among economists and policymakers. Using newly digitized microdata, we evaluate the Korean government's policy that promoted heavy and chemical industries between 1973 and 1979 by cutting taxes and building new industrial...

This paper estimates the elasticity of substitution between capital and skill using variation across U.S. counties in immigration-induced skill mix changes between 1860 and 1930. We find that capital began as a q-complement for skilled and unskilled workers, and then dramatically increased its...

Why are some places more entrepreneurial than others? We use Census Bureau data to study local determinants of manufacturing startups across cities and industries. Demographics have limited explanatory power. Overall levels of local customers and suppliers are only modestly important, but new...

The severity of the Great Depression in the United States varied by region. Most notably compared with the rest of the country, the South Atlantic states experienced a milder contraction while the Mountain states suffered more severely. The impact of the contraction was more" uniform across...

We use data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures to study the characteristics and geography of investments in robots across U.S. manufacturing establishments. We find that robotics adoption and robot intensity (the number of robots per employee) is much more strongly related to establishment...

We examine changes in the spatial distribution of good jobs across US commuting zones over 1980-2000 and 2000-2021. We define good jobs as those in industries in which full-time workers attain high wages, accounting for individual and regional characteristics. The share of good jobs in...

This paper examines the impact of industrial policies (IPs) on innovation in the global automobile industry. We compile the first comprehensive dataset linking global IPs with patent data related to the auto industry from 2008 to 2023. We document a major shift in policy focus: by 2022, nearly...

Industrial policies (IPs) include such varying practices as production subsidies, export subsidies, and import protection, and are commonly used by countries to promote targeted sectors. However, such policies can have significant impacts on sectors other than those targeted by the IPs,...