We examine the dynamics of a country's growth, consumption, and sovereign debt, assuming that the government is myopic and wants to maximize short-term, self-interested spending. Surprisingly, government myopia can increase a country's access to external borrowing. In turn, access to borrowing...

What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...

We use novel and unique survey data from Italy to shed light on key questions regarding the measurement of social capital and the use of social capital indicators for empirical work. Our data cover a sample of over 600,000 respondents interviewed between 2000 and 2015. We identify four distinct...

Using dissertation research topics found in the EconLit database and large-scale algorithmic methods that identify author demographics based on names, we explore the link between race and ethnicity and fields of economic research. We find that underrepresented racial and ethnic minority (URM)...

Fears that globalization necessarily hurts the environment are not well-founded. A survey reveals little statistical evidence, on average across countries, that openness to international trade undermines national attempts at environmental regulation through a race to the bottom' effect. If...

This paper reviews arguments and evidence on the impact of globalization on the environment, then presents evidence on production and international trade flows in five heavily polluting industries for 52 countries over the period 1981-98. A new decomposition of revealed comparative advantage...

How should international economic policy address climate change? Does trade cause deforestation and endangered species depletion? How does globalization affect air and water pollution? Do trade and investment create a race to the bottom in environmental policy? How important are environmental...

Using a new specification, we reanalyze the data on worldwide environmental quality investigated by Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger in a well-known paper on the environmental Kuznets curve (which postulates an inverse U shaped relationship between income level and pollution). The new...

Evidence suggests that some pollutants follow an inverse-U-shaped pattern relative to countries' incomes. This relationship has been called the out a simple and straight-forward static model of the microfoundations of the pollution-income relationship. We show that the environmental Kuznets...