The collapse of economic activity in 2020 from COVID-19 has been immense. An important question is how much of that resulted from government restrictions on activity versus people voluntarily choosing to stay home to avoid infection. This paper examines the drivers of the collapse using cellular...

The collapse of economic activity in 2020 from COVID-19 has been immense. An important question is how much of that collapse resulted from government-imposed restrictions on activity versus people voluntarily choosing to stay home to avoid infection. This paper examines the drivers of the...

Resource misallocation can lower aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). We use micro data on manufacturing establishments to quantify the potential extent of misallocation in China and India compared to the U.S. Compared to the U.S., we measure sizable gaps in marginal products of labor and...

The positive correlation between PPP investment rates and PPP income levels across countries is one of the most robust findings of the empirical growth literature. We show that this relationship is almost entirely driven by differences in the price of investment relative to output across...

Resource misallocation can lower aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). We use micro data on manufacturing establishments to quantify the extent of this misallocation in China and India compared to the U.S. in recent years. Compared to the U.S., we measure sizable gaps in marginal products...