Over a quarter of the world's population lives in economies that have undertaken transitions from central planning to market economies. These transitions entail far-reaching and complex changes in social, economic and political institutions and have had widely divergent outcomes. Important...

This paper surveys the neoclassical theory of aggregate investment and its criticisms. We distinguish four main formulations of this theory: the traditional 'Wicksellian' investment function; the Fisherian 'array-of-opportunities' approach (as Witte Jr. called it); the Jorgensonian model; the...

To study the effect of political and institutional changes on the economy, we look at share prices in the Santiago exchange during the tumultuous political events that characterized Chile in the early 1970s. We use a transparent empirical strategy, deploying previously unused daily data and...

Despite growing interest in the effect of political-institutional factors on the economy, causally identified evidence on the reaction of financial markets to electoral outcomes is still relatively scarce, due to the difficulty of isolating causal effects. This paper fills this gap: we estimate...

As well-known, the canonical Neo-Kaleckian growth model fails to reconcile actual and normal rates of utilization in equilibrium. Some recent contributions revive an old proposal for solving this problem - making the normal rate of utilization an endogenous variable that converges to the actual...

This paper looks at the effect of demand shocks on the investment share of the economy. Using panel data on 20 OECD countries, we show that the rate of growth of autonomous demand (exports, public spending and housing investment) is positively correlated with subsequent values of the share of...

We study the role of political parties in shaping local fiscal policy in the context of Brazilian cities in the 2004-2016 period. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we find no effect of left-wing mayors on the size of the city government nor on the allocation of spending across main budget...

It is widely held that studying economics makes you more selfish and politically conservative. We use a difference-in-differences strategy to disentangle the causal impact of economics education from selection effects. We estimate the effect of four different intermediate microeconomics courses...

This paper surveys the neoclassical theory of aggregate investment and its criticisms. We identify four main strands in neoclassical investment theory: (i) the traditional Wicksellian model; (ii) the Fisherian "array-of-opportunities" approach; (iii) the Jorgensonian model; (iv) the now...

We use a rigorous three-stage many-analysts design to assess how different researcher decisions—specifically data cleaning, research design, and the interpretation of a policy question—affect the variation in estimated treatment effects. A total of 146 research teams each completed the same...