The US trade war against China in 2018-2019 can either enhance or diminish the US soft power in China, depending on whether it is recognized as legitimate by Chinese citizens. We study how the viewership of US movies--an important element of the US soft power--is affected by the trade war,...

In this paper we use New Immigrant Survey data to investigate the impact of immigrant women's own labor supply prior to migrating and female labor supply in their source country to provide evidence on the role of human capital and culture in affecting their labor supply and wages in the United...

This paper examines demand systems where the demand for a good depends on other prices only through a common price aggregator (a scalar function of all prices). We refer to this property as ``generalized separability'' and provide the functional forms of demand that this property implies when...

This paper examines demand systems where the demand for a good depends only on its own price, consumer income, and a single aggregator synthesizing information on all other prices. This generalizes directly-separable preferences where the Lagrange multiplier provides such an aggregator. As...

Continuous time is a superior representation of both the economic and climate systems that Integrated Assessment Models (IAM) aim to study. Moreover, continuous-time representations are simple to express. Continuous-time models are usually solved by discretizing time, but the quality of a...

Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified managers. We investigate how expulsions of senior Jewish managers, due to rising discrimination in Nazi Germany, affected large corporations. Firms that lost Jewish managers experienced persistent reductions in...

Democracy is not an absorbing state; transitions to autocratic rule have been frequent throughout history and often followed periods of instability under democratic rule. In this paper, we ask whether autocrats can win support among voters by showcasing their ability to restore order and to "get...

Social capital is often associated with desirable political and economic outcomes. This paper contributes to the literature exploring the "dark side" of social capital, examining the downfall of democracy in interwar Germany. We collect new data on the density of associations in 229 German towns...

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many...

We document that the spread of the Mafia in Sicily at the end of the 19th century was in part shaped by the rise of socialist Peasant Fasci organizations. In an environment with weak state presence, this socialist threat triggered landholders, estate managers and local politicians to turn to the...