Using a large-scale real effort experiment, we explore whether and how different peer assignment mechanisms affect worker performance and stress. Letting individuals choose whom to compare to increases productivity to the same extent as a targeted exogenous matching policy designed to maximize...

We study the effects of place-based policies on aggregate productivity using administrative data on projects co-financed by the EU in Italy linked to balance sheet data. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in funding for a large place-based policy stemming from measurement error in regional...

This paper examines how publication-based tenure-track systems affect the careers of Ph.D. graduates in Economics. We leverage a 2010 reform in Italy that replaced open-ended assistant professor (AP) positions with fixed-term contracts and introduced publication minimum requirements for career...

Vietnam’s path to sustainable and innovative growth increasingly depends on how effectively it diversifies and repositions its export portfolio in the global market, or how the country “brand” itself through its exports to the world. Using data from UN Comtrade, we construct the Product...

This paper studies China's four-fold increase in per capita GDP relative to the U.S. between 1995 and 2019. First, we argue that China's growth pattern is very similar to that of several other East Asia economies that initially grew very quickly. Second, we show that a minimalist...

Many policymakers view power outages as a major constraint on firm productivity in developing countries. Yet empirical studies find modest short-run effects of outages on firm performance. This paper builds a dynamic macroeconomic model to study the long-run general-equilibrium effects of power...

International trade is dominated by a small number of very large firms. Models of trade with heterogeneous firms have been developed to study the causes and consequences of this observation. The canonical model of trade with heterogeneous firms shows that trade leads to between-firm...

This paper studies the effect of structural change on the historical path of aggregate labor productivity growth for a large sample of European countries, and it builds a quantitative multi-sector growth model to analyze the potential impact that structural change may have on future productivity...

How do exporters expand their product scope and geographical presence? We argue that new exporters are uncertain about their profitability in different countries and products, but learn it as they start to export. As a consequence, exporters add products and countries sequentially, in an...

While countries make use of a wide range of policies to attract multinational firms, identifying the effect of such policies is difficult. Combining firm-level data on both the location of these firms' foreign affiliates and detailed service-specific information from Costa Rica's investment...