During the nineteenth century, the US manufacturing sector shifted away from the "hand labor" mode of production, characteristic of artisan shops, to the "machine labor" of the factory. This was the focus of an extremely detailed but extraordinarily complex study by the Commissioner of Labor...

Debates have long centered around the relative merits of prizes and other incentives for technological innovation. Some economists have cited the experience of the prestigious Royal Society of Arts (RSA), which offered honorary and cash awards, as proof of the efficacy of innovation prizes. The...

Technological advances and genomic sequencing opened the road to personalized medicine: specialized therapies targeted to patients displaying specific molecular alterations. For instance, targeted therapies are now available for 50% of lung cancer patients--with some alterations affecting less...

We develop and estimate a new model of endogenous growth in bank efficiency and firm productivity in which banks adopt technology embedded in capital goods produced by entrepreneurs, and agents choose whether to become workers or capital-good-producing entrepreneurs. In this framework, bank...

For most of human history, until the fertility transition, technological progress translated into larger populations, preventing sustained improvements in living standards. We argue that migration offered an escape valve from these Malthusian dynamics after the European discovery and...

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States effectively "spent" about 4 percent of GDP -- via reduced economic activity -- to address a mortality risk of roughly 0.3 percent. Many experts believe that catastrophic risks from advanced A.I. over the next decade are at least this large,...

Using newly-collected data on the near-population of U.S. STEM PhD graduates since 1950, we examine who funds PhD training, how many graduates are trained in areas of strategic national importance, and the effects of public investment in PhD training on the scientific workforce. The U.S. federal...

This paper studies how innovation reacts to foreign political risk and shapes its economic consequences. In a model with foreign political shocks that can disrupt the supply of foreign inputs, we show that greater political risk abroad increases domestic innovation, thereby lowering reliance on...

Cars have gotten bigger and faster yet more fuel efficient in recent decades. Why? We estimate an equilibrium model of car attribute production using U.S. household microdata for 1995-2017 and structurally decompose attribute trends into underlying mechanisms. We find that technical change led...