We use the PISA student-level achievement database to estimate international education production functions. Student characteristics, family backgrounds, home inputs, resources, teachers and institutions are all significantly related to math, science and reading achievement. Our models account...

We examine immigrant entrepreneurship and the survival and growth of immigrant-founded businesses over time relative to native-founded companies. Our work quantifies immigrant contributions to new firm creation in a wide variety of fields and using multiple definitions. While significant...

Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of human from Africa tens of...

A large body of evidence suggests that social comparisons matter for workers' valuation of the wage they receive. The consequences of social comparisons in imperfectly competitive labor markets are less well understood. We analyze an oligopsonistic model of the labor market where workers derive...

For the procurement of complex goods the early exchange of information is important to avoid costly renegotiation ex post. We show that this is achieved by bilateral negotiations but not by auctions. Negotiations strictly outperforms auctions if sellers are likely to have superior information...

We propose an explanation of why Europeans choose to work fewer hours than Americans and also suffer higher rates of unemployment. Labor market regulations, unemployment benefits, and high levels of public consumption in many European countries reduce, ceteris paribus, the gains from being...

This paper provides a critical review of models of the spread of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that have been influential in recent policy discussions. It notes potentially important features of the real- world environment that the standard models do not incorporate and discusses reasons why...