Growth has fallen in the U.S., while firm concentration and profits have risen. Meanwhile, labor's share of national income is down, mostly due to the rising market share of low labor share firms. We propose a theory for these trends in which the driving force is falling firm-level costs of...

During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic change in IPO activity around the world. Though vibrant IPO activity, attributed to better institutions and governance, used to be a strength of the U.S., it no longer is. IPO activity in the U.S. has fallen compared to the rest of the world...

We build up from the plant level an "aggregate(d)" Solow residual by estimating every U.S. manufacturing plant's contribution to the change in aggregate final demand between 1976 and 1996. Our framework uses the Petrin and Levinsohn (2010) definition of aggregate productivity growth, which...

This paper estimates, using data from the United States and Euro Area, a two-country stochastic growth model in which both neutral and investment-specific technology shocks are nonstationary but cointegrated across economies. The results point to large and persistent swings in productivity, both...

Counter to extant stylized facts, using newly available data on country allocations in U.S. investors' foreign equity portfolios we find that (i) U.S. investors do not exhibit returns-chasing behavior, but, consistent with partial portfolio rebalancing, tend to sell past winners; and (ii) U.S....

We examine portage sites in the U.S. South, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, including those on the fall line, a geomorphologic feature in the southeastern U.S. marking the final rapids on rivers before the ocean. Historically, waterborne transport of goods required portage around the falls at these...

The recent crisis highlighted the importance of globally active banks in linking markets. One channel for this linkage is through how these banks manage liquidity across their entire banking organization. We document that funds regularly flow between parent banks and their affiliates in diverse...

The "Federalist financial revolution" may have jump-started the U.S. economy into modern growth, but the Free Banking System (1837-1862) did not play a direct role in sustaining it. Despite lowering entry barriers and extending banking into developing regions, we find in county-level data that...

Over the last 50 years, there has been a remarkable convergence in the occupational distribution between white men, women, and blacks. We measure the macroeconomic consequences of this convergence through the prism of a Roy model of occupational choice in which women and blacks face frictions in...