We organized business associations for the owner-managers of randomly selected young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,800 firms into small groups whose managers held monthly meetings for one year, and into a “no- meetings” control...

Whether the danger invoked is nuclear war or genetically modified foods, far more people in some countries than in others say they are afraid. Using data from six surveys, I show that the levels of reported fear of different dangers correlate strongly across both individuals and countries. I...

We document geographic concentration by both venture capital firms and venture capital-financed companies in three cities - San Francisco, Boston, and New York. We find that firms open new satellite offices based on the success rate of venture capital-backed investments in an area. Geography is...

Industrial clusters are promoted by policy and generally viewed as good for growth and development, but both clusters and policies may also enable non-competitive behavior. This paper studies the presence of non-competitive pricing in geographic industrial clusters. We develop, validate, and...

Several Chinese cities have invested billions of dollars to construct new industrial parks. These place based investments solve the land assembly problem which allows many productive firms to co-locate close to each other. The resulting local economic growth creates new opportunities for real...

We combine data on trade, production, and input use to compute the value added content of trade for forty-two countries from 1970 to 2009. For the world, the ratio of value added to gross trade falls by ten to fifteen percentage points, with two-thirds of this decline in the last two decades....

We develop a property-rights model of the firm in which production entails a continuum of uniquely sequenced stages. In each stage, a final-good producer contracts with a distinct supplier for the procurement of a customized stage-specific component. Our model yields a sharp characterization for...

This paper makes two methodological contributions. First, it proposes a framework to decompose total production activities at the country, sector, or country-sector level, to different types, depending on whether they are for pure domestic demand, traditional international trade, simple GVC...