We examine the effect of a large-scale administrative reorganization in China, where counties are annexed into cities to accommodate urban growth. We present a simple model to illustrate how this annexation may affect firm entry decisions and in turn land market outcomes. Using nationwide data...

This paper studies regional treatment effects of infrastructure projects on economic growth, employment and intermodal transport volumes. The recent Belt and Road Initiative provides an experiment that can be evaluated using matching econometrics. Our results show that the establishment of a new...

This paper studies the role played by politics in shaping the Italian railway network, and its impact on long-run growth patterns. Examining a large state-planned railway expansion that took place during the second half of the 19th century in a recently unified country, we first study how both...

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...

We study the nature of peer effects in the market for new cell phones. Our analysis builds on de-identified data from Facebook that combine information on social networks with information on users’ cell phone models. To identify peer effects, we use variation in friends’ new phone...

In this paper, we review the literature on declining business dynamism and its implications in the United States and propose a unifying theory to analyze the symptoms and the potential causes of this decline. We first highlight 10 pronounced stylized facts related to declining business dynamism...

We ask whether epidemic exposure leads to a shift in financial technology usage within and across countries and if so who participates in this shift. We exploit a dataset combining Gallup World Polls and Global Findex surveys for some 250,000 individuals in 140 countries, merging them with...