In the presence of markup differences, externalities and other social considerations, the equilibrium direction of innovation can be systematically distorted. This paper builds a simple model of endogenous technology, which generalizes existing comparative static results and characterizes...

The authors study employment outcomes during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in eight countries with different case levels and policy responses: the United States, Australia, France, Denmark, Italy, South Korea, Spain, and Sweden. While the share of people not at work increased in all...

This paper assesses the claim the the US faces an impending labor shortage due to the impending retirement of baby boomers and slow growth of the US work force, and that the country should orient labor market and educational policies to alleviate this prospective shortage. I find that this...

Digital labor markets are rapidly expanding and connecting companies and contractors on a global basis. We review the environment in which these markets take root, the micro- and macro-level studies of their operations, their ongoing evolution and recent trends, and perspectives for undertaking...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...

We draw on stylized facts from the finance literature to build a model where altering the relative costs of bank and bond financing changes the entire distribution of firm size, with implications for the aggregate capital stock, output, and welfare. Reducing transactions costs in the bond market...

This paper examines whether financial development boosts the growth of small firms more than large firms and hence provides information on the mechanisms through which financial development fosters aggregate economic growth. We define an industry's technological firm size as the firm size...

We consider a tractable model of heterogeneous production units that features endogenous entry and productivity investment to assess the quantitative impact of policy distortions on aggregate output and establishment size. Relative to the standard factor misallocation framework, policy...

In most countries, equity is a cheap source of funding for a country's largest financial institutions. On average, the stocks of the top 10% financial companies in a country account for over a quarter of total market capitalization, but these stocks earn returns that are significantly lower than...

We investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment laws, collective bargaining laws, and social security laws in 85 countries. We find that richer countries regulate labor less than poorer countries do, although they have more generous social security systems. The political power...