A common narrative is that COVID-19 cost Trump re-election. We do not find supporting evidence; if anything, the pandemic helped Trump. However, we find substantial evidence that voters abandoned Trump in counties with large increases in health insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act,...

This paper uses a gravity framework to investigate the effects of distance as well as subnational and national borders in knowledge spillovers. Drawing on the NBER Patent Citations Database, we examine patent citations data at metropolitan level within the U.S. and the 38 largest patent-cited...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

This paper conducts a broad-based comparison of iterated and direct multi-step forecasting approaches applied to both univariate and multivariate models. Theoretical results and Monte Carlo simulations suggest that iterated forecasts dominate direct forecasts when estimation error is a...

Consumption risk sharing among U.S. federal states increases in booms and decreases in recessions. We find that small firms' access to credit markets plays an important role in explaining this stylized fact: business cycle fluctuations in aggregate risk sharing are more pronounced in states in...

Uncertainty about the level of demand is thought to influence irreversible capacity decisions. This paper examines some implications of the theory literature on this topic in an empirical study of the US cement industry between 1994 and 2006. Firms in this sector have the ability to deliver...