We find that over the period 1950-1990, US states absorbed increases in the supply of schooling due to tighter compulsory schooling and child labor laws mostly through within-industry increases in the schooling intensity of production. Shifts in the industry composition towards more...

We combine growth theory with US Census data on individual schooling and wages to estimate the aggregate return to human capital and human capital externalities in cities. Our estimates imply that a one-year increase in average schooling in cities increases their aggregate labor productivity by...

Returns to scale to capital and the strength of capital externalities play a key role for the empirical predictions and policy implications of different growth theories. We show that both can be identified with individual wage data and implement our approach at the city-level using US Census...

We estimate the aggregate long-run elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers (the slope of the demand curve for more relative to less educated workers) at the US state level. Our data come from the (five)1950-1990 decennial censuses. Our empirical approach allows for...

The identification of aggregate human capital externalities is still not fully understood. The existing (Mincerian) approach confounds positive externalities with wage changes due to a downward sloping demand curve for human capital. As a result, it yields positive externalities even when wages...

The paper estimates agglomeration-effects for France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK. Estimation takes into account endogeneity of the spatial distribution of employment and spatial fixed-effects. Empirical results suggest that agglomeration-effects in these European countries are only...

Building on the idea that members of religious communities insure each other against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious communities should be more widespread where populations face greater common risk. Our empirical analysis exploits rainfall risk as a source of common...

International industry data permits testing whether the industry-specific impact of cross-country differences in institutions or policies is consistent with economic theory. Empirical implementation requires specifying the industry characteristics that determine impact strength. Most of the...

We study how restrictions on firm entry affect intersectoral factor reallocation when open economies experience global economic shocks. In our theoretical framework, countries trade freely in a range of differentiated sectors that are subject to country-specific and global shocks. Entry...