We estimate the causal real economic effects of a randomized anticorruption crackdown on local governments in Brazil over the period 2003-2014. After anti-corruption audits, municipalities experience an increase in economic activity concentrated in sectors most dependent on government...

Commercial policies are often only efficient insofar as those harmed can be compensated. In practice, compensatory measures fall far short of distributive harm. We rationalize the paucity of compensation as a strategic effort on the part of elected officials to withhold information about effects...

We use worker-firm matched data from Homebase to construct new real-time estimates of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employment and hours worked of small businesses. We find four key results: (1) employment of small businesses in four of the hardest hit service sectors contracted by an...

In den vergangenen Jahren hat die Zahl der Pensionäre (ehemalige Beamte, Richter und Soldaten) in Deutschland deutlich zugenommen. Damit gehen immer höhere Versorgungsausgaben einher, die Bund, Länder und Gemeinden aufbringen müssen. Der demographische Wandel könnte in Zukunft nicht nur...

Die vorliegende Studie ist der Frage gewidmet, wie sich verschiedene demografische, sozioökonomische und persönliche Faktoren auf die Diskrepanz zwischen der tatsächlichen und der gewünschten wöchentlichen Arbeitszeit eines Individuums auswirken. Die Untersuchung von Arbeitszeitdiskrepanzen...

This paper maps out the trade relationship in goods between the two largest trading blocs in the global economy - the EU and US. We use detailed product category information to provide an in-depth description of current trade flows between the two markets, with a particular focus on how Irish-US...

The canonical supply{demand model of the wage returns to skill has been extremely in uential; however, it has faced several important challenges. Several studies show that the standard approach sometimes produces theoretically wrong-signed elasticities of substitution, yields counterintuitive...

As a consequence of missing data on tests for infection and imperfect accuracy of tests, reported rates of cumulative population infection by the SARS CoV-2 virus are lower than actual rates of infection. Hence, reported rates of severe illness conditional on infection are higher than actual...

We develop an analytically tractable method to estimate the fraction of unreported infections in epidemics with a known epicenter and estimate the number of unreported COVID-19 infections in the U.S. during the first half of March 2020. Our method utilizes the covariation in initial reported...

While the savings of retired singles tend to fall with age, those of retired couples tend to rise. We estimate a rich model of retired singles and couples with bequest motives and uncertain longevity and medical expenses. Our estimates imply that while medical expenses are an important driver of...