We provide an assignment model to decompose changes in between-group wage inequality into changes in the composition of the workforce, the productivity/demand for tasks, computerization, and labor productivity. The model incorporates comparative advantage between many groups of workers, many...

We study the competitive forces that shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand,...

What determines the technology that a country adopts? While many factors affect technological adoption, the efficiency of the country's financial system may also play a significant role. To address this question, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with...

Researchers typically invoke theoretical assumptions to estimate mark-ups. Instead, we directly obtain mark-ups by surveying Pakistani soccer-ball producers. We document six facts: (1) Mark-ups are more dispersed than costs; (2) Mark-ups and costs increase with firm size; (3) The mark-up...

Does adoption of broadband internet in firms enhance labor productivity and increase wages? And is this technological change skill biased or factor neutral? We exploit rich Norwegian data to answer these questions. A public program with limited funding rolled out broadband access points, and...

We study how the strength of property rights to individual extractive firms affects a regulator’s choice over exploitation rates for a natural resource. The regulator is modeled as an intermediary between current and future resource harvesters, rather than between producers and consumers, as...

Bimetallism disappeared as a monetary regime in the 1870s. Flandreau (1996) clearly demonstrates that French bimetallism would have been able to withstand the German de-monetization of silver. Could it have withstood if many other countries in the world moved to the gold standard following in...

We use regression discontinuity and regression kink designs to estimate the impact of need-based grant aid on the borrowing and educational attainment of students enrolled in a large public university system. Pell Grant aid substantially reduces borrowing: among students who would borrow in the...

In the Belle Époque, Belgium recorded an unprecedented trade boom, but growth in output per capita was lackluster. We seek to reconcile this ostensible paradox. Because of the sharp decline in both fixed and variable trade costs, the trade boom was as much about the expansion in the number of...

Long half-lives of real exchange rates are often used as evidence against monetary sticky price models. In this study we show how exchange rate regimes alter the long-run dynamics and half-life of the real exchange rate, and we recast the classic defense of such models by Mussa (1986) from an...