Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has experienced a growing wage differential: high-skilled workers have claimed an increasing share of available income, while low-skilled workers have seen an absolute decline in real wages. How and why this disparity has arisen is a matter of ongoing...

Designing benefits for the growing platform workforce in the U.S. poses significant challenges. While platform workers need protection against unforeseen shocks, work that is often part time and spread across multiple platforms makes the traditional benefits model untenable. This paper reports...

We analyze whether receiving care from higher-priced hospitals leads to lower mortality. We overcome selection issues by using an instrumental variable approach which exploits that ambulance companies are quasi-randomly assigned to transport patients and have strong preferences for certain...

We empirically assess the potential financial impact of future gene therapies on the US economy. After identifying 109 late-stage gene therapy clinical trials currently underway, we estimate the number of new and existing patients with corresponding diseases to be treated by these gene...

We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compare the cost of living and welfare across countries, while incorporating product variety measured by the count of barcodes or firms. For 47 countries, we compare welfare relative to the United States to conventional measures of real...

Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. We show that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distribution of sellers. These weights are based on...

The 'China shock' operated in part through the housing market, and that is an important reason why the China shock was as big as it was. If housing prices had not responded at all to the China shock, then the total employment effect of the China shock would have been reduced by more than...

This paper is the first attempt to structurally estimate the impact of globalization on markups, and the effect of changing markups on welfare, in a monopolistic competition model. To achieve this, we work with a class of preferences that allow for endogenous markups and firm entry and exit that...

Since 1995, growth in productivity in the United States appears to have accelerated dramatically. In this paper, we argue that part of this apparent speed-up actually represents gains in the terms of trade and tariff reductions, especially for information-technology products. We demonstrate how...

The Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Plan represents the most significant privatization of the delivery of a public insurance benefit in recent history, with dozens of private insurers offering a wide range of products with varying prices and product features; the typical elder had a choice of...