We review patterns in migration within the US over the past thirty years. Internal migration has fallen noticeably since the 1980s, reversing increases from earlier in the century. The decline in migration has been widespread across demographic and socioeconomic groups, as well as for moves of...

Economic hardship is strongly reflected by the housing market. It is the concern of much research, but its analysis is often obstructed by insufficient lagged data. This paper evaluates search intensity for "hardship letter" from Google Insights to detect ensuing mortgage delinquencies. Such...

It is now well-established that the U.S. housing market crisis preceded the labor market crisis and that, in the wake of these crises, doubling-up and cohabitation increased and homeownership fell. What is less clear is what happened at the subnational level. This study reports on: 1) how the...

Large wage differences between countries ("place premiums") are well documented. Theory suggests that factor price convergence should follow increased migration, capital flows, and commercial integration. All three have increased between the United States and Mexico over the last 25 years. This...

We develop a theory of a firm in an environment with incomplete contracts. The firm's headquarter decides on the complexity, the organization, and the global scale of its production process. Specifically, it decides: i) on the mass of symmetric intermediate inputs that are part of the value...

The validity of existing empirical tests of the Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) is constantly under scrutiny due to two shortcomings. First, the issues of unobserved heterogeneity and measurement error in environmental regulation are typically ignored due to the lack of a credible, traditional...

The international economic debate on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has focused mainly on trade induced real income gains while the FDI related and innovation induced benefits have been largely neglected, although the EU and the US are leading FDI host countries and...

We exploit the designs of two separate U.S. refugee dispersal policies to provide causal evidence that refugees foster outward FDI to their countries of origin. Drawing upon aggregated individual-level refugee and project-level FDI data, we first leverage the quasi-random distribution of...

We provide the first solid evidence that Chinese superstitious beliefs can have significant effects on house prices in a North American market with a large immigrant population. Using real estate data on close to 117,000 house sales, we find that houses with address number ending in four are...