This paper studies key markets (financial, labor, natural resource, and product) to assess how they are facilitating or constraining growth. First, we draw on the body of existing theoretical and empirical literature to discuss the links between markets and growth. Second, we present four...

There is evidence that the introduction of unilateral divorce legislation (UDL) starting in the late 1960s increased US divorce rates. We ask whether making divorce easier affected the educational structure of marriage. Based on marriage and divorce certificate data covering 1970-1988, we...

There is growing evidence on the role of economic conditions in the recent successes of populist and extremist parties. However, little is known about the role of over-indebtedness, even though debtor distress has grown in Europe following the financial crisis. We study the unique case of the...

We use highly consistent national-coverage price and wage data to provide evidence on wage increases, labor-saving technology introduction, and price pass-through by a large low-wage employer facing minimum wage hikes. Based on 2016-2020 hourly wage rates of McDonald’s Basic Crew and prices of...

Forced migration traumatizes millions displaced from their homes, but little is known about the few who manage to stay and become a minority in a new society. We study the case of German stayers in Sudetenland, a region from which Czechoslovakia expelled ethnic Germans after World War Two. The...

We describe the firm-type structure of the use of the main Czech kurzarbeit program (called Antivirus B) during the spring 2020 pandemic wave. Evidence based on the Structure of Earnings Survey shows large participation gaps in favor of large employers, and disproportionately high intensity of...

A growing literature exploits a feature of centralized college admission systems where students with similar admission scores in a neighborhood of a school’s admission threshold are or are not offered admission based on small quasi-random differences in admission scores. Assuming that the...