The importance of the prehistoric migration of anatomically modern humans from Africa for comparative economic development has been the focus of a vibrant research agenda in the past decade. This influential literature has attracted the attention of some scholars from other disciplines, and in...

Technological progress and trade potentially affect wages and employment. Technological progress can make jobs obsolete and trade can increase unemployment in import competing sectors. Empirical evidence suggests that both causes are important to explain recent labour market developments in many...

The nexus between corruption and economic growth has been examined for a long time. Many empirical studies measured corruption by the reversed Transparency International's Perception of Corruption Index (CPI) and ignored that the CPI was not comparable over time. The CPI is comparable over time...

We use the US presidential election on 3 November 2020 to examine how the US president influences economic expectations of international experts. We design a large-scale RCT among 843 experts working in 107 countries, asking about their expectations regarding GDP growth, unemployment, inflation,...

We use census data to show that structural transformation reflects a fundamental reallocation of labor from goods to services, instead of a relabelling that occurs when goods-producing firms outsource their in-house service production. The novelty of our approach is that it categorizes labor by...

This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity, when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...