Trade theorists have come to understand that their theory is ambiguous on the question: Are trade and factor flows substitutes? While this sounds like an open invitation for empirical research, hardly any serious econometric work has appeared in the literature. This paper uses history to fill...

Although the empirical growth literature has yielded many findings on postwar convergence patterns, it has had little to say about the determinants of convergence in earlier epochs. This paper investigates convergence for group of seven countries during the period 1870-1914, the last great phase...

The Global Repository of Income Dynamics (GRID) is a new open-access, cross- country database that contains a wide range of micro statistics on income inequality, dynamics, and mobility. It has four key characteristics: it is built on micro panel data drawn from administrative records; it fully...

We examine productivity growth since World War II in the five leading research economies: West Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States. Available data on the capital-output ratio suggest that these countries grew as they did because of their ability to adopt more...

We document the consequences of losing a job across countries using a harmonized research design. Workers in Denmark and Sweden experience the lowest earnings declines following job displacement, while workers in Italy, Spain, and Portugal experience losses three times as high. French and...

This paper provides evidence on child penalties in female and male earnings in different countries. The estimates are based on event studies around the birth of the first child, using the specification proposed by Kleven et al. (2018). The analysis reveals some striking similarities in the...

The "debt-overhang hypothesis" - that households cut back more on their spending in a crisis when they have higher levels of outstanding mortgage debt (Dynan, 2012) - seems to be taken for granted by macroprudential authorities in several countries in their policy decisions, as well as by the...

In the post Lehman period, the interest rate of the US dollar became low on the forward contract because of"flight to quality" to the international currency. However, in the Euro crisis, that of the Sterling pound became equally low, while the other European currencies such as the Danish kroner...

We construct a novel plant-level dataset to examine the process of technology adoption during a period of rapid technological change: The diffusion of mechanized cotton spinning during the Industrial Revolution in France. We document new stylized facts that can help explain why major...

While human capital is a strong predictor of economic development today, its importance for the Industrial Revolution has typically been assessed as minor. To resolve this puzzling contrast, we differentiate average human capital (literacy) from upper-tail knowledge. As a proxy for the...