Many countries are trying to diversify their economies. Sri Lanka is an example. Governments like Sri Lanka often lack the capabilities to lead diversification programs, however. One of these capabilities relates to targeting new sectors to promote and pursue through a diversification policy:...

Countries differ markedly in the diversification of their exports. Products differ in the number of countries that export them, which we define as their ubiquity. We document a new stylized fact in the global pattern of exports: there is a systematic relationship between the diversification of a...

In this paper we provide a model of Research Joint Venture (RJV), and study the incentives of competing firms to cooperate in product development. Firms that participate in the RJV decide on the product components for joint development, i.e., they decide on how much to cooperate. We consider...

We estimate the quot;place premiumquot;-the wage gain that accrues to foreign workers who arrive to work in the United States. First, we estimate the predicted, purchasing-power adjusted wages of people inside and outside the United States who are otherwise observably identical-with the same...

Concerns about the breadth of the U.S. income distribution and limited intergenerational mobility have led to a focus on educational achievement gaps by socio-economic status (SES). Using intertemporally linked assessments from NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA, we trace the achievement of U.S. student...

Urban change involves transformations in the physical appearance and the social composition of neighborhoods. Yet, the relationship between the physical and social components of urban change is not well understood due to the lack of comprehensive measures of neighborhood appearance. Here, we...

This essay analyzes the persistence of the death penalty in the United States – a topic that has long been the subject of debate among legal scholars, social scientists, and historians. Adopting a comparative framework by focusing on the United States and France (the last Western European...

There is widespread agreement among economists – and a diverse set of other policy analysts – that at least in the long run, an economy-wide carbon pricing system will be an essential element of any national policy that can achieve meaningful reductions of CO2 emissions cost-effectively in...

The study of urban and local politics in the United States has long been hindered by a lack of centralized sources of election data. We introduce a new dataset of nearly 55,000 electoral contests that encompasses races for seven distinct local political offices in most medium and large cities...

We study the global distributive consequences of the “Great Reflation.” The conventional wisdom holds that the increases in interest rates resulting from high inflation in the United States will have a negative impact on the rest of the world (and developing countries in particular) due to...