This research suggests that the distribution of land within and across countries affected the nature of the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy generating diverging growth patterns across countries. Land abundance, which was beneficial in early stages of development, generated...

This research suggests that favorable geographical conditions, that were inherently associated with inequality in the distribution of land ownership, adversely affected the implementation of human capital promoting institutions (e.g., public schooling and child labor regulations), and thus the...

This paper suggests that inequality in the distribution of land ownership adversely affected the emergence of human capital promoting institutions (e.g., public schooling) and thus the pace and the nature of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, contributing to the...

Foreign investors' changing appetite for risk-taking has been shown to be a key determinant of the global financial cycle. Such fluctuations in risk sentiment also correlate with the dynamics of uncovered interest parity (UIP) premia, capital flows, and exchange rates. To understand how these...

We study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on euro area inflation and how it compares to the experiences of other countries, such as the United States, over the two-year period 2020-21. Our model-based calibration exercises deliver four key results: (1) compositional effects, or the switch...

This paper builds on Baqaee and Farhi (2022) and di Giovanni et al. (2022) to quantify the contribution of fiscal policy to U.S. inflation over the December 2019-June 2022 period. Model calibrations show that aggregate demand shocks explain roughly two-thirds of total model-based inflation, and...

We estimate a multi-country, multi-sector New Keynesian model to quantify the drivers of domestic inflation during 2020-23 in several countries, including the United States. The model matches observed inflation together with sector-level prices and wages. We further measure the relative...

We examine the role of declining mortality in explaining the rise of retirement over the course of the 20th century. We construct a model in which individuals make labor/leisure choices over their lifetimes subject to uncertainty about their date of death. In an environment in which mortality is...

We study the effects of financial frictions on firm exit when firms face large liquidity shocks. We develop a simple model of firm cost-minimization that introduces a financial friction that limits firms' borrowing capacity to smooth temporary shocks to liquidity. In this framework, firm exit...