We document a Kuznets curve for construction productivity in 20th-century America. Homes built per construction worker remained stagnant between 1900 and 1940, boomed after World War II, and then plummeted after 1970. The productivity boom from 1940 to 1970 shows that nothing makes technological...

We quantify the aggregate, regional and sectoral impacts of transportation productivity growth on the US economy over the period 1947-2017. Using a multi-region, multi-sector model that explicitly captures produced transportation services as a key input to interregional trade, we find that the...

We provide a comprehensive overview of codetermination, i.e., worker representation in firms' governance and management. We cover the institution's history, implementation, and the best available evidence on its economic impacts. We argue that existing quasiexperimental estimates suggest that...

The advent of a pandemic is an exogenous shock, but the dynamics of contagion are very much endogenous --and depend on choices that individuals make in response to incentives. In such an episode, economic policy can make a difference not just by alleviating economic losses but also via...

Species extinctions and ecological degradation are accelerating to a degree unprecedented in human history. We present causal evidence on the economic drivers of biodiversity loss using a novel panel dataset on the types and quantities of wildlife at thousands of locations across the U.S. from...

Why do cities differ so much in productivity? Using a split-sample IV strategy, we document that up to three quarters of the large measured dispersion in productivity across US cities is spurious and reflects the "luck of the draw" of idiosyncratically heterogeneous plants. Due to this...

Racial social isolation within and across workplaces may reduce firm productivity. We provide descriptive evidence that African-Americans feel socially isolated from Whites. To test whether isolation affects productivity, we estimate models of Total Factor Productivity for manufacturing firms...

About one-fifth of paid workdays will be supplied from home in the post-pandemic economy, and more than one-fourth on an earnings-weighted basis. In view of this projection, we consider some implications of home internet access quality, exploiting data from the new Survey of Working Arrangements...

We explore the role of founding teams in accounting for the post-entry dynamics of startups. While the entrepreneurship literature has largely focused on business founders, we broaden this view by considering founding teams as both the founders and early joiners. We investigate the idea that the...