Growth has accelerated in a wide range of developing countries over the last couple of decades, resulting in an extraordinary period of convergence with the advanced economies. We analyze this experience from the lens of structural change - the reallocation of labor from low- to...

Why are certain movies more successful in some markets than others? Are the entertainment products we consume reflective of our core values and beliefs? These questions drive our investigation into the relationship between a society's oral tradition and the financial success of films. We combine...

After fifty years of catching up to the United States level of productivity, since 1995 Europe has been falling behind. The growth rate in output per hour over 1995-2003 in Europe was just half that in the United States, and this annual growth shortfall caused the level of European productivity...

Data on sales of memory modules are used to explore several aspects of e-retail demand. There is a strong relationship between e-retail sales to a given state and sales tax rates that apply to purchases from online retailers. This suggests that there is substantial substitution between online...

Most items are sold to consumers by retail stores. Stores have two features that distinguish them from auctions. First, the price is posted and a consumer who values the good at more than the posted price is sold the good. Second, the sale takes place as soon as the consumer decides to buy. In...

Retailers are increasingly selling goods and services via subscriptions instead of spot markets. In this paper, we study one benefit to the retailer of selling subscriptions: the possibility that - presumably because of inattention or inertia - consumers continue to pay for subscriptions after...

Digitization has led to product proliferation, straining traditional institutions for product discovery; but digitization has also spawned crowd-based rating systems. We compare the relative impacts of professional critics and crowd-based Amazon star ratings on consumer welfare in book...

Media outlets often present diverging, even conflicting, perspectives on reality -- not only informing, but potentially misinforming audiences. We study the extent to which misinformation broadcast on mass media at the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic influenced health outcomes. We first...

This paper utilizes household-level budget data from the 1889/90 United States Commissioner of Labor survey to estimate the full Almost Ideal Demand System with demographic and other covariates. Price data were obtained from the Aldrich Report of 1892. The purpose is to make better use of the...

Information frictions play a central role in the formation of household inflation expectations, but there is no consensus about their origins. We address this question with novel evidence from survey experiments. We document two main findings. First, individuals in lower-inflation contexts have...