Common culture and common language facilitate trade between people. Minorities have incentives to become assimilated and to learn the majority language so that they have a larger pool of potential trading partners. The value of assimilation is larger to someone from a small minority than to one...

We study the dynamic taxation of capital and labor in the Ramsey model under the assumption that taxes and public good provision are decided by a self-interested politician who cannot commit to policies. We show that, as long as the discount factor of the politician is equal to or greater than...

We establish an important role for the firm by studying capital reallocation decisions of mutual fund firms. At least 30% of the value mutual fund managers add can be attributed to the firm's role in efficiently allocating capital amongst its mutual fund managers. We find no evidence of a...

The stability of the labor share of income is a key foundation in macroeconomic models. We document, however, that the global labor share has significantly declined since the early 1980s, with the decline occurring within the large majority of countries and industries. We show that the decrease...

Two recent meta-analyses use variants of the Baily, Hulten, and Campbell (1992) (BHC) decompositions to ask whether recent robust growth in Aggregate Labor Productivity (ALP) across twenty-five countries is due to lower barriers to input reallocation. They find weak gains from measured...

We document how a plant-specific shock to investment opportunities at one plant of a firm ("treated plant") spills over to other plants of the same firm--but only if the firm is financially constrained. While the shock triggers an increase in investment and employment at the treated plant, this...