In this paper we study the dynamics of local employment growth in West Germany from 1980 to 2001. Using dynamic panel techniques, we analyse the timing of the impact of diversity and specialisation, as well as of the human capital structure of local industries. Diversity has a positive effect on...

This research explores the historical roots of the division of labor in pre-modern societies. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that intra-ethnic diversity had a positive effect on the division of labor across ethnicities in the pre-modern era. Exploiting a variety of...

Relationships have changed dramatically in the last fifty years. Fewer couples are marrying, more are cohabiting. Reasons for this shift abound, but the shift may have consequences of its own. A number of models predict that those cohabiting will specialize less than those marrying. Panel data...

Are ethnic specialization and thus a downward sloping labor demand curve fundamental features of labor market competition between ethnic groups? In a general equilibrium model, this paper argues that spillover effects in skill acquisition and social distances between ethnic groups engender...

Firms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. It has been thought since the time of Adam Smith that a firm's internal structure affects its productivity through the channel of gains from specialization. Our paper...

Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of "structured" management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for...

The division of labor between and within countries is driven by two fundamental forces, comparative advantage and increasing returns. We set up a simple Ricardian model with a Marshallian input sharing mechanism to study their interplay. The key insight that emerges is that the interaction...

Analyses of spatial or network data are now very common. Yet statistical inference is challenging since unobserved heterogeneity can be correlated across neighboring observational units. We develop an estimator for the variance-covariance matrix (VCV) of OLS and 2SLS that allows for arbitrary...

We investigate whether and how social ties affect performance in teams by implementing a field experiment in which a sample of undergraduate students are randomly assigned to either teams composed by friends or teams composed by individuals not linked by friendship relationships. Students...

This paper looks at the channels through which intangible assets affect productivity. The econometric analysis exploits a new dataset on intangible investment (INTAN-Invest) in conjunction with EUKLEMS productivity estimates for 10 EU member states from 1998 to 2007. We find that (a) the...