What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of...

Using data collected by the International Institute of Agriculture, we document the disintegration of international commodity markets between 1913 and 1938. There was dramatic disintegration during World War I, gradual reintegration during the 1920s, and then a very substantial disintegration...

We present a new class of social cost-of-living indices and a nonparametric framework for estimating these and other social cost-of-living indices. Common social cost-of-living indices can be understood as aggregator functions of approximations of individual cost-of-living indices. The Consumer...

Resource shares, defined as the fraction of total household spending going to each person in a household, are important for assessing individual material well-being, inequality and poverty. They are difficult to identify because consumption is measured typically at the household level, and many...

We investigate whether immigrant and minority workers' poor access to high-wage jobs - that is, glass ceilings - is attributable to poor access to jobs in high-wage firms, a phenomenon we call glass doors. Our analysis uses linked employer-employee data to measure mean- and quantile-wage...

We construct a peer effects model where mean expenditures of consumers in one's peer group affect utility through perceived consumption needs. We provide a novel method for obtaining identification in social interactions models like ours, using ordinary survey data, where very few members of...

Individuals may be poor even if their household is not poor, because the intra-household distribution of resources may be unequal. We develop a model wherein the resource share of each person in a collective household - defined as their share of household consumption - may be estimated by simple...

Individuals may be poor even if their household is not poor, because the intra-household distribution of resources may be unequal. Dunbar, Lewbel and Pendakur (2013) develop a model wherein the resource share of each person in a collective household - defined as their share of total household...

We provide a new full-commitment intertemporal collective household model to estimate resource shares, defined as the fraction of household expenditure enjoyed by household members. Our model implies nonlinear time-varying household quantity demand functions that depend on fixed effects. We...

We provide a method to estimate resource shares - the fraction of total household expenditure allocated to each household member - using OLS estimation of Engel curves. The method is a linear reframing of the nonlinear model of Dunbar, Lewbel and Pendakur (2013), extended to allow single-parent...