Households tend to hold substantial amounts of non-financial assets in the form of inventory. Households can obtain significant financial returns from strategic shopping and optimally managing these inventories of consumer goods. In addition, they choose to maintain liquid savings - household...

Are the costs of discrimination mainly borne by the targeted group or by society? This paper examines both individual and aggregate costs of ethnic discrimination. Studying Germans living in the U.S. during World War I, an event that abruptly downgraded their previously high social standing, we...

We combine survey data on British and German immigrants in the US with data on natives in Britain and Germany to estimate the causal effect of migration on educational mobility through cross-national marriage. To control for selective mating, we instrument educational attainment using government...

Virtually all theories of economic growth predict a positive relationship between population size and productivity. In this paper I study a particular historical episode to provide direct evidence for the empirical relevance of such scale effects. In the aftermath of the Second World War about...

This paper introduces the concept of "climate matching" as a driver of migration and establishes several new results. First, we show that climate strongly predicts the spatial distribution of immigrants in the US, both historically (1880) and more recently (2015), whereby movers select...

Electoral incentives may lead policymakers to eschew opportunities for common-interest reform, focusing instead on zero-sum, partisan policymaking. By forgoing opportunities for common-interest reforms, incumbents may convince their constituents that such reforms are rarely feasible, so that...

Amid growing interest in industrial policy, we develop a model exploring the tension between market-driven information discovery and policymakers' career incentives. While market-based information discovery can help address informational barriers faced by policymakers, career incentives may lead...

How does gender composition influence individual and group behavior? To study this question empirically, we assembled a new, national sample of United States city council elections and digitized information from the minutes of over 40,000 city-council meetings. We find that replacing a male...

We evaluate the effects of a program in Brazil that selects and trains new politicians, addressing three main challenges: selection bias from program screening, self-selection into candidacy, and the need to quantify the contributions of both selection and training in a holistic evaluation. Our...

Policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper investigates the e fficiency criteria for allocating policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or non elected bureaucrats. Politicians are more efficient for tasks that do not involve too much specific technical...