Innovation policy can be a crucial component of governments' responses to crises. Because speed is a paramount objective, crisis innovation may also require different policy tools than innovation policy in non-crisis times, raising distinct questions and tradeoffs. In this paper, we survey 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...

People who delay claiming Social Security receive higher lifelong benefits upon retirement. We survey individuals on their willingness to delay claiming later, if they could receive a lump sum in lieu of a higher annuity payment. Using a moment-matching approach, we calibrate a lifecycle model...

We investigate the extent to which conflicts between Native American tribes and U.S. Army troops were caused by poor economic conditions in Europe from 1869 to 1890. We hypothesize that contractions in economic activity pushed many Europeans to move to the western United States in search of...

Intensive agriculture and deep plowing resulted in top-soil erosion and dust storms during the 1930s. These effects have been shown to affect agricultural income and land values that persisted for years. Given the growing literature on the relevance of in-utero and early-life exposures, it is...

Much of the increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity has been in developing countries with a history of famines and malnutrition. Prior research has pointed to the association between overweight and famine exposure during developmental ages as one of several explanations and has...

Building and Loan Associations (B&Ls) financed over half of new houses constructed in the U.S. during the 1920s but they lost their predominance within the following decades as they were pushed to convert into Savings and Loans (S&Ls). This study examines whether the U.S. government-insured...

The share of US residents who were born in Latin America and the Caribbean plateaued recently, after a half century of rapid growth. Our review of the evidence on the US immigration wave from the region suggests that it bears many similarities to the major immigration waves of the 19th and early...

Americans are notoriously bad savers. Large numbers are reaching old age too poor to finance retirements that could last longer than they worked. This study uses the 2018 American Community Survey to impute retirement ages for 2019 Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF) respondents. Next, we run the...

We propose using penalized withdrawals from retirement savings accounts, identified from U.S. tax records, as a revealed-preference tool to characterize households' valuation of liquidity. A simple dynamic model formalizes the notion that the prevalence of withdrawals can be used to characterize...