Since Chinese government initiated economic reform in the late 1970s, entrepreneurship and private sectors have emerged gradually and played an increasingly important role in promoting economic growth. However, entrepreneurship is distributed unevenly in China. Using micro data from 2008...

The impact of the incumbent state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on the births of new private-owned enterprises (POEs) in China is a central concern for the government and society. In this paper, we apply agglomeration theories to distinguish the linkages between SOEs and POEs. Using China's 2008...

This paper assesses the impact of the first wave of the pandemic on the local economies of one of the hardest-hit countries, Italy. We combine quarterly local labor market data with the new machine learning control method for counterfactual building. Our results document that the economic...

The teleworkability of jobs - whether they can and will be performed remotely - has been increasingly contested in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. To explain which jobs are teleworkable and why, we emphasize the institutional context of a job, including differences among firms, union...

Culture has played a pivotal role in human evolution. Yet, the ability of social scientists to study culture is limited by the currently available measurement instruments. Scholars of culture must regularly choose between scalable but sparse survey-based methods or restricted but rich...

We propose and test empirically a theory describing the endogenous formation and persistence of mega-states, using China as an example. We suggest that the relative timing of the emergence of agricultural societies, and their distance from each other, set off a race between their autochthonous...

Culture has played a pivotal role in human evolution. Yet, the ability of social scientists to study culture is limited by the currently available measurement instruments. Scholars of culture must regularly choose between scalable but sparse survey-based methods or restricted but rich...

This study investigates why the strong form of the spatial equilibrium is weakly supported in the literature. Using a discrete choice model, it shows that the strong form of the spatial equilibrium is rarely observed because workers are imperfectly mobile from the perspective of researchers....

Fracking innovations revolutionized the United States oil and gas industry and facilitated a boom in energy production in states with oil and gas resources. This paper examines effects of oil and gas booms within a state on individual employment and earnings. To account for endogenous migration...

This paper examines local labor market outcomes from an oil and gas boom. We examine two main outcomes across gender, race, and ethnicity: the probability of employment in the oil and gas industry and the log wages of workers employed outside the oil and gas industry. We find that men and women...