The socio-economic impact of Reaganomics and its long-run deleterious legacy is documented. The preponderance of data indicate that economic growth was not particularly impressive in the wake of the tax cuts of 1981 or 1986. GDP did snap back to potential but failed to accelerate beyond the...

This study examines the causal joint effect of a new political regime and war against Iraq on life expectancy of Iranians for the period 1978–1988 during the revolution and war. I use a synthetic control approach to construct a synthetic Iran based on a weighted average of other Middle East...

This paper analyzes new evidence on long-run trends in aggregate wealth accumulation and wealth inequality in Western countries. The new findings suggest that wealth-income ratios were lower before World War I than previously claimed, that wealth concentration fell over the past century and has...

Brain drain is a core economic policy problem for many developing countries today. Does relative inequality in source and destination countries influence the brain-drain phenomenon? We explore human capital selectivity during the period 1820-1909.We apply age heaping techniques to measure human...

Evidence suggests that the prehistoric Out of Africa Migration has impacted the degree of intrapopulation genetic and phenotypic diversity across the globe. This paper provides the first evidence that this migration has shaped cultural diversity. Leveraging a folklore catalogue of 958 oral...

Iron Curtain and Big Data are two words usually used to denote completely two different eras. Yet, the context the former offers and the rich data source the latter provides, enable the causal identification of the effect of networks on migration. Academics in countries behind the Iron Curtain...

Emigration of young, motivated individuals may deprive countries-of-origin of entrepreneurs. We isolate exogenous variation in a large emigration wave from Italy between 2008 and 2015 by interacting diaspora networks with economic pull factors in destination countries, and find that larger...

Recent surveys of the literature on climate change and migration emphasize the important diversity of outcomes and approaches of the empirical studies. In this paper, we conduct a meta-analysis in order to investigate the role of the methodological choices of these empirical studies in finding...