Economic models provide little insight into when the next big idea and its associated productivity dividend will come along. Once a general purpose technology (GPT) is identified, the economist's toolkit does provide an understanding when firms will adopt a new technology and for what purpose....

Over the last several decades, rising pay dispersion between firms accounts for the majority of the dramatic increase in earnings inequality in the United States. This paper shows that a distinct cross-cohort pattern drives this rise: newer cohorts of firms enter more dispersed and stay more...

Relational contracts - informal self-enforcing agreements sustained by repeated interactions - are ubiquitous both within and across organizational boundaries. This review highlights recent empirical contributions in selected areas. We begin by reviewing some recent work that explicitly takes...

This paper studies the predictability of long-term unemployment (LTU) and analyzes its main determinants using rich administrative data in Sweden. Compared to using standard socio-demographic variables, the predictive power more than doubles when leveraging the rich data environment. The largest...

This paper identifies the impact of fluctuations in the supply of capital from mutual funds on municipal bond financing and makes three contributions to the literature. First, we develop an identification strategy based on the Morningstar rating methodology at the moment that funds reach 5 years...

Consumer choices are increasingly mediated by algorithms, which use data on those past choices to infer consumer preferences and then curate future choice sets. Behavioral economics suggests one reason these algorithms so often fail: choices can systematically deviate from preferences. For...

Following Uber-initiated fare increases, drivers make more money per trip and, initially, more per hour-worked. Drivers begin to work more hours. However, this increase in hours-worked--combined with a reduction in demand from a higher fare--has a business stealing effect, with drivers spending...

What is the impact of male and female alumni speaker interventions in introductory microeconomics courses on student interest in economics? Using student-level transcript data, we estimate the effect of speakers on future course-taking in models which use untreated lectures as control groups,...

We provide a liquidity-based theory for the dominant use of the US dollar as the unit of denomination in global debt contracts. Firms need to trade their revenue streams for the assets required to extinguish their debt obligations. When asset markets are illiquid, as modeled via endogenous...

The expansion in farm size is an important contributor to agricultural productivity in developed countries, but the reallocation process is hindered in less developed economies. How do distortions to factor reallocation affect farm dynamics and agricultural productivity? We develop a model of...