In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is really an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but...

This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs...

We explore in this paper the role of export subsidies when goods arriving from foreign countries are initially of unknown quality to domestic consumers, who learn about their quality only through consumption. If, when confronted with such goods, consumers view price as a signal of quality, a...

Alan Garber and Jonathan Skinner (2008) famously conjectured that the US health care system was “uniquely inefficient” relative to other countries. We test this idea using cross-country data on prescription drug sales newly linked with an arguably objective measure of relative therapeutic...

Pharmaceutical products can be of poor quality either because they contain zero correct active ingredient (referred to as "counterfeit") or because they contain a non-zero but incorrect amount of the right active ingredient (referred to as "substandard"). While both types of poor-quality drugs...

The special legal status of Indian tribes in the U.S. means that state excise taxes are not necessarily collected on cigarette purchases on Indian reservations. We focus on two under-studied but basic empirical economic questions this raises. Using novel data from New York surveys that asked...

A growing literature suggests that high-income countries export high-quality goods. Two hypotheses may explain such specialization, with different implications for welfare, inequality, and trade policy. Fajgelbaum, Grossman, and Helpman (2011) formalize the Linder hypothesis that home demand...

Improving school quality with limited resources is a key issue of policy. It has been suggested that instructing teachers to follow specific practices together with tight monitoring of their activities may help improve outcomes in under-performing schools that usually serve poor populations....

This paper studies the effect of durability on the financing of durable assets. We show that more durable assets require larger down payments of internal funds per unit of capital making them harder to finance, because durability affects the price of an asset and hence the overall financing need...

We present a heterogeneous-firm model in which management ability increases both production efficiency and product quality. Combining six micro-datasets on management practices, production and trade in Chinese and American firms, we find broad support for the model's predictions. First, better...