We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components are different types of...

We use transaction-level US import data to compare firms from virtually all countries in the world competing in a single destination market. Guided by a simple theoretical framework, we decompose countries' market shares into the contribution of the number of firm-products, their average...

Does economic uncertainty promote the implementation of structural reforms? We answer this question using one of the most exhaustive cross-country panel data set on reforms in six major areas and measuring economic uncertainty with stock market volatility. To address endogeneity concerns, we...

We use transaction-level data to study changes in the concentration of US imports. Concentration has fallen in the typical industry, while it is stable by industry and country of origin. The fall in concentration is driven by the extensive margin: the number of exporting firm has grown, and the...

We study how various types of machines, namely, information and communication technologies, software, and especially industrial robots, affect the demand for workers of different education, age, and gender. We do so by exploiting differences in the composition of workers across countries,...

We examine the effect of the Covid pandemic on willingness to work along both the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply. Special survey questions in the Job Search Supplement of the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) allow us to elicit information about individuals' desired work...

We construct a theory of intergenerational preference transmission that rationalizes the choice between alternative parenting styles (related to Baumrind 1967). Parents maximize an objective function that combines Beckerian and paternalistic altruism towards children. They can affect their...

We construct a dynamic theory of civil conflict hinging on inter-ethnic trust and trade. The model economy is inhabitated by two ethnic groups. Inter-ethnic trade requires imperfectly observed bilateral investments and one group has to form beliefs on the average propensity to trade of the other...

We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on the experience of Uganda during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document causal effects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic conflicts in 2002-04. We exploit two waves of...

This paper investigates the effect of domestic market size on innovation activities across different durable good industries in the Chinese manufacturing sector. We address the endogeneity of market size by an IV strategy, based on a measure of potential market size, which is driven only by...