Payoff heterogeneity weakens positive feedback in binary choice models in two ways. First, heterogeneity drives individuals to corners where they are unaffected by strategic complementarities. Second, aggregate behaviour is smoother than individual behaviour when individuals are heterogeneous....

A welfare analysis of unemployment insurance (UI) is performed in a general equilibrium job search model. Finitely-lived, risk-averse workers smooth consumption over time by accumulating assets, choose search effort when unemployed, and suffer disutility from work. Firms hire workers, purchase...

Miguel, Satyanath, and Sergenti (2004) argue that lower rainfall levels and negative rainfall shocks increase conflict risk in Sub-Saharan Africa. This conclusion rests on their finding of a negative correlation between conflict in t and rainfall growth between t-1 and t-2. I argue that this...

A key aspect of industrialization is the adoption of increasing-returns-to-scale, industrial, technologies. Two other, well-documented aspects are that industrial technologies are adopted throughout intermediate-input chains and that they use intermediate inputs intensively relative to the...

We combine growth theory with US Census data on individual schooling and wages to estimate the aggregate return to human capital and human capital externalities in cities. Our estimates imply that a one-year increase in average schooling in cities increases their aggregate labor productivity by...

We estimate the effect of international trade on average labor productivity at the country level. Our empirical approach relies on summary measures of trade that, we argue, are preferable on both theoretical and empirical grounds to the one conventionally used. In contrast to the marginally...

To learn more about the effect of economic conditions on civil war, we examine whether Sub-Saharan civil wars are more likely to start following downturns in the international price of countries’ main export commodities. The data show a robust effect of commodity price downturns on the...

Returns to scale to capital and the strength of capital externalities play a key role for the empirical predictions and policy implications of different growth theories. We show that both can be identified with individual wage data and implement our approach at the city-level using US Census...