I estimate CES aggregate production functions for the US, the UK, Japan, Germany, and Spain using data from the EU KLEMS database. I distinguish between three types of capital: information and communication technologies (ICT), intellectual property (IP) capital, and traditional capital. I assume...

Industrial activity periodically experiences breakthrough innovations in energy efficiency, but the estimated impacts of these innovations on aggregate energy use are highly varied. We develop a general equilibrium model to investigate whether this variation is determined by the structure of the...

We revisit Max Weber's hypothesis on the role of Protestantism for economic development. We show that nationalism is crucial to both, the interpretation of Weber's Protestant Ethic and empirical tests thereof. For late nineteenth-century Prussia we reject Weber's suggestion that Protestantism...

Maximizing output without taking into consideration the negative externalities generated, including the harm to the mental and physical health of the population creates psychological stress. Focusing on the bellwether indicators of economic performance including working more, generating income,...

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

This paper introduces the probabilistic formulation of continuous-time economic models: forward stochastic differential equations (SDE) govern the dynamics of backward-looking variables, and backward SDEs capture that of forward-looking variables. Deep learning streamlines the search for the...

We study the relationship between outside options and workers’ motivation to exert effort. We evaluate changes in outside options arising from age and experience cutoffs in the Austrian unemployment insurance (UI) system, and use absenteeism as a proxy for worker effort. Results indicate that...

In standard promotion tournaments, contestants are ranked based on their output or productivity. We argue that workers’ career progression may also depend on their relative rankings in dimensions a priori unrelated to their job performance, such as visibility or in-person presence. Such...

We examine the effect of inter-group fiscal competition on within-group violent conflict. Using a triple difference design, we exploit exogenous variation in the degree to which villages in sub-districts compete for public funds. We find that higher competition between villages reduces conflict...