Although many U.S. state policies presume that human capital is important for state economic development, there is little research linking better education to state incomes. In a complement to international studies of income differences, we investigate the extent to which quality-adjusted...

Chapter 1. Economic Growth and Business Cycles in the United States -- Chapter 2. Mr. Wesley Clair Mitchell: The Advent of U.S. and NBER Business Cycle Research -- Chapter 3. Measuring Business Activity, An Introductions to the Contributions of Mr. Persons, Mr. Schumpeter, Mr. Haberler, and Mr....

We investigate the long-term macroeconomic effects of climate change across 48 U.S. states over the period 1963.2016 using a novel econometric strategy which links deviations of temperature and precipitation (weather) from their long-term moving-average historical norms (climate) to various...

Between 1997 and 2014, US corn, soybean and cotton production almost fully converted to genetically modified crops. Starting around 2007, improved tight oil and shale gas technologies turned the declining US fossil fuel production into a booming industry. We study the effects of these two...

Cross-country regressions suggest that urbanization and FDI are important drivers of growth. However, it is not clear that primacy eventually hurts growth performance. Since it is tough to interpret cross-country growth regressions, we provide detailed evidence on the determinants of outward FDI...

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...

There is substantial consensus in the literature that positive uncertainty shocks predict a slowdown of economic activity. However, using U.S. data since 1950 we show that the macroeconomic response pattern to stock market volatility shocks has changed substantially over time. The negative...