We find that greater institutional ownership is associated with more innovation. To explore the mechanism, we contrast the "lazy manager" hypothesis with a model where institutional owners increase innovation incentives through reducing career risks. The evidence favors career concerns. First,...

This paper examines whether financial development facilitates economic growth by scrutinizing one rationale for such a relationship: that financial development reduces the costs of external finance to firms. Specifically, the authors ask whether industrial sectors that are relatively more in...

We compare answers to policy questions by economic experts and a representative sample of the US population. We find a 35 percentage point difference between the two groups. This gap is only partially explained by differences in ideological or personal characteristics of the two samples....

To identify the effect of social capital on financial development, we exploit social capital differences within Italy. In high-social-capital areas, households are more likely to use checks, invest less in cash and more in stock, have higher access to institutional credit, and make less use of...

US productivity growth accelerated after 1995 (unlike Europe's), particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). Using two new micro panel datasets we show that US multinationals operating in Europe also experienced a "productivity miracle." US multinationals obtained...

We provide new evidence on the growth in pay at the very top of the wage distribution in the United Kingdom. Sectoral decompositions show that workers in the financial sector have accounted for the majority of the gains at the top over the last decade. New results are also presented on the pay...

We examine the "technology sourcing" hypothesis that foreign research labs located in the U.S. tap into U.S. R&D spillovers and improve home country productivity. We show that U.K. firms that established a high proportion of inventors based in the U.S. by 1990 benefited disproportionately from...

We explain a counterintuitive empirical finding: Firms facing more import competition do more innovation. In our model, factors are trapped inside a firm. An increase in import competition encourages a firm to innovate by reducing the opportunity cost of inputs. Without trapped factors, trade...