Gravity as both fact and theory is one of the great success stories of recent research on international trade, and has featured prominently in the policy debate over Brexit. We first review the facts, noting the overwhelming evidence that trade tends to fall with distance. We then introduce some...

Since the recovery from the great financial crisis in 2010, global real trade flows grew much slower than pre-crisis, in both absolute terms (growth rates) and relative terms (relative to GDP, from 2:1 in the great 1990’s to 1:1 since 2012) A debate has arisen as to whether this global trade...

We propose new methods to identify the full impact of country-specific characteristics on bilateral trade flows within the framework of ‘the new quantitative trade model.’ We complement theory with a simple two-stage estimating procedure, and offer a proof of concept by quantifying the...

Epidemiological models assume gravity-like interactions of individuals across space without microfoundations. We combine a simple epidemiological frame-work with a dynamic model of individual location choice. The model predicts that flows of people across space obey a structural gravity...

This paper studies structural change in production networks for intermediate inputs (input-output network) and new capital (investment network). For each network, we document a declining fraction of production by goods sectors and a rising fraction of production by services sectors. We develop a...

This paper studies empirically the effect of education policies on human capital and per capita income. The results suggest for European and OECD countries that higher attendance at pre-primary education, greater autonomy of schools and universities, a lower student-to-teacher ratio, higher age...

This study is the first to explore long-run trends of numeracy for the 1820-1949 period in 165 countries, and its contribution to growth. Estimates of the long-run numeracy development of most countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, America, and Europe are presented, using age-heaping...

Employing an endogenous growth model with human capital, this paper explores how productivity shocks in the goods and human capital producing sectors contribute to explaining aggregate fluctuations in output, consumption, investment and hours. Given the importance of accounting for both the...

This study replicates and challenges the finding of zero wage returns to compulsory schooling in Germany by Pischke and von Wachter (Review of Economics and Statistics, 90(3), 592-598), which is unusual in the literature yet widely cited and until now uncontradicted. I document that this finding...

We analyze self-selection and sorting of emigrants from Finland, using full-population administrative data from Statistics Finland. We analyze emigration events lasting at least five years and decompose migrant self-selection into education, occupation, and unobserved abilities. Our analysis...