The US federal system provides great potential for estimating the effects of policy on behavior. There are numerous empirical studies that exploit variation in policies over space and time. In pursuing this line of enquiry, the issue of policy endogeneity is central. If state policy making is...

This paper uses household data from India to examine the economic and social status of village politicians, and how individual and village characteristics affect politician behavior while in office. Education increases the chances of selection to public office and reduces the odds that a...

We find that institutional ownership in publicly traded companies is associated with more innovation (measured by cite-weighted patents). To explore the mechanism through which this link arises, we build a model that nests the lazy-manager hypothesis with career-concerns, where institutional...

Patents citations are a potentially powerful indicator of technological innovation. Analysing the new IFS-Leverhulme database on over 200 major British firms since 1968 we show that patents have an economically and statistically significant impact on firm-level productivity and market value. We...

We derive robust predictions on the effects of uncertainty on short run investment dynamics in a broad class of models with (partial) irreversibility. When their environment becomes more uncertain firms become more cautious and less responsive to demand shocks. This result contrasts with the...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin's Q, sales growth and survival...

What policies and institutions are needed to sustain long-run growth in the UK? We describe an optimistic story of the UK economy over the past 30 years. From the late 1970s, the UK reversed a century of relative decline in terms of per capita GDP with our main counterparts in the US, France and...

What institutions and policies are needed to sustain UK economic growth in the dynamic world economy of the twentyfirst century? After years of inadequate investment in skills, infrastructure and innovation, there are longstanding structural weaknesses in the economy, all rooted in a failure to...

What policies and institutions are needed to sustain long-run growth in the UK? We describe an optimistic story of the UK economy over the past 30 years. From the late 1970s, the UK reversed a century of relative decline in terms of per capita GDP with our main counterparts in the US, France and...