Recent studies indicate that the natural resource curse, that is, the negative link between resource abundance and growth, may operate through a country’s financial system. Scholars show that resource-abundant economies suffer from lower financial development, which may indirectly affect...

How do geographic frictions affect firm organization? We show theoretically and empirically that geographic frictions increase the use of middle managers in multi-establishment firms. In our model, we assume that a CEO's time is a resource in limited supply, shared across headquarters and...

Digital work settings potentially facilitate remote collaboration and thereby decrease geographic frictions in knowledge work. Here, I analyze spatial collaboration patterns of some 191 thousand software developers in the United States on the largest code repository platform GitHub. Despite...

We investigate the long-run consequences of historic, climatic temperatures (1730-2000) for the modern cross-country income distribution. Using a newly constructed dataset of climatic temperatures stretching over three centuries (18th, 19th, and 20th), we estimate a robust and significant...

This study examines the relationship between farm size and productivity in U.S. agriculture during 1982-92. A nonparametric regression method is applied to detect ex-post geographical patterns in changes in farm size and productivity. The estimations show that (i) in 1982 productivity per acre...