Why do cities differ so much in productivity? We document that most of the measured dispersion in productivity across US cities is spurious and reflects granularity bias: idiosyncratic heterogeneity in plant-level productivity and size, combined with finite plant counts. As a result, economies...

In contrast to what several papers have argued recently, we show that firm heterogeneity fosters agglomeration of economic activity. If firms are more similar with respect to their total factor productivity, each company faces a lower propensity to export. This renders the home market more...

This paper develops a static model of endogenous task-based technical progress to study how factor scarcity induces technological progress and changes in factor prices. The equilibrium technology is multi-dimensional and not strongly factor-saving in the sense of Acemoglu (2010). Nevertheless,...

We investigate the relationship between market structure and platforms' incentives to adopt technological innovations in two-sided markets, where platforms may find it optimal to charge zero price on the consumer side and to extract surplus on the advertising side. We consider innovations that...

In a Cournot oligopoly set up with constant marginal cost and linear demand, innovation is rewarding. In this paper we work with a Cournot oligopoly framework with increasing marginal cost and linear demand and show that innovation may not be rewarding. We endogenize the success probability of...

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...