Infrastructure assets have undergone substantial privatization in recent decades. How do different types of owners target and manage these assets? And does the contract form--control rights (concession) vs. outright ownership (sale)--matter? We explore these questions in the context of global...

We estimate the long-term effect of public R&D on growth in manufacturing by analyzing new data from the Cold War era Space Race. We develop a novel empirical strategy that leverages US-Soviet rivalry in space technology to isolate windfall R&D spending. Our results demonstrate that public R&D...

Infrastructure costs in the United States are high and rising. The procurement process is one potential cost driver. In this paper we conduct a survey of procurement practices across the 50 states. We survey both employees at each state department of transportation (DOT) and the road builders...

Despite the incentives of incumbent domestic listed corporations (DLCs) in the electricity generation industry, private equity, institutional investors, and foreign corporations have played an outsized role in financing the energy transition. These new entrants are twice as likely to create...

Social welfare spending on health, welfare, and insurance against adverse outcomes expanded a great deal in all of the developed countries during the 20th century. The institutional structure of the spending varies with respect to the extent that governments or market institutions provide the...

The safety nets in high-income countries before 1900 and in low-income countries today were based on savings and aid from extended family, friends, charities, churches, and small amounts from local governments. Mutual societies and eventually insurance companies offered insurance against lost...

We examine how one of the largest U.S. place-based economic development programs, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of 1988, with annual revenues in excess of \$40 billion, affects local firm total employment and sales through direct channels and through IGRA's effects on adjacent...

How accurate are older people's expectations about their future Social Security benefits? Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study, we compare respondents' observed Social Security claiming ages and benefits with subjective expectations provided during their 50s and early 60s. We...

In this paper, we use micro data on a large number of European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to examine the wealth accumulation (saving) behavior of the retired elderly in Europe. To summarize our main findings, we find that less than half of the...

In recent decades, many states have reduced future retirement benefits for newly hired teachers. We estimate that in 2020 the average initial monthly retirement benefit, for teachers retiring with 30 years of service, is 11.2 percent lower than that of teachers retiring in the same plan with the...