The paper applies time-dependent conditional frontier estimators in order to examine the effect of human capital on countries’ economic efficiency levels. Specifically, time-dependent conditional full and partial efficiency measures are applied to a sample of 123 countries for the period of...

In response to the imposition of steep enough sanctions for employing illegal migrants, the firm reassigns managers from supervision of production to verification of the legality of its workforce. This impedes production efficiency, reduces wages, and hurts the native workers.

We calibrate a two-sector span-of-control model and show that size-dependent labor regulations generate the observed employment distribution across manufacturing establishments in India. We find that such regulations in manufacturing reduce productivity in agriculture and impede the process of...

We re-examine the view that a ban on price discrimination in input markets is particularly desirable in the presence of buyer power. This argument crucially depends on an inverse relationship between downstream firms’ profits and the uniform input price. Assuming different input efficiencies...

This paper shows that the degree of ancestral individualism is positively related to annual earnings across second-generation US immigrants. This provides evidence in favor of Gorodnichenko and Roland’s (2011b) hypothesis that the individualistic dimension of culture is important for long-term...

We estimate panel vector autoregressions to analyze the highly disputed relationship between sovereign debt and economic growth. Using data on 20 developed countries, we find no evidence for a robust effect of debt on growth, even for higher levels of debt. We do find a significant negative...

Alfaro, Kalemli-Ozcan, and Volosovych (2008) argue that accounting for differences in institutional quality makes the Lucas Paradox disappear. We show that their key finding is driven by the presence of outliers. Once we control for them, we find that the Lucas Paradox remains.

We examine the link between pre-colonial statehood and contemporary regional African development, as reflected in satellite images on light density at night. We employ a variety of historical maps to capture the former. Our within-country analysis reveals a strong positive correlation between...

Unit specific effects are often used to estimate non-spatial efficiency. We extend such estimators to the case where there is spatial autoregressive dependence and introduce the concept of spillover efficiency. Intuitively, we present an approach to benchmark how successful units are at...

The principal goal of this article is to identify the implications of a binding emission constraint on a firm’s optimal capital–labor ratio and to determine whether it is appropriate to write a firm’s production function as an increasing function of its emissions alone. I find that even...