Compared to the federal government, the average citizen in the U.S. has far greater interaction with city governments, including policing, health services, zoning laws, utilities, schooling, and transportation. At the regional level, it is city governments that provide the infrastructure and...

Terrorist attacks influence economic growth and individual psychology. However, identifying the direct effect of terrorism on economics and psychology is difficult because institutions also change in response to terrorist attacks. This paper controls for institutional responses to terrorist...

This paper exploits hand-collected data on illegal insider trades to test whether standard illiquidity measures can detect informed trading. Controlling for unobserved cross-sectional and time-series variation, sampling bias, and strategic timing of insider trades, I find that only absolute...

We study the relation between mutual fund managers' family backgrounds and their professional performance. Using hand-collected data from individual Census records on the wealth and income of managers' parents, we find that managers from poor families deliver higher alphas than managers from...

We use the price effects caused by the passage of rent control in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2021, to study the transfer of wealth across income groups. First, we find that rent control caused property values to fall by 6-7%, for an aggregate loss of $1.6 billion. A calibrated model of house prices...

This paper proposes a network model of the economy in which conglomerate firms transmit idiosyncratic shocks from one industry to another. The strength of inter-industry connections is determined by the conglomerate's share of total industry sales and by the industry's share of the...

Concentration is a single summary statistic driven by two opposing forces: the number of firms in a market and the evenness of their market shares. This paper introduces a generalized measure of concentration that allows researchers to vary the relative importance of each force. Using the...