Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near...

The government contracts with a foreign firm to extract a natural resource that requires an upfront investment and which faces price uncertainty. In states where profits are high, there is a likelihood of expropriation, which generates a social cost that increases with the expropriated value. In...

We investigate how demand conditions affect employers' provision of safety - something about which theory is ambivalent. Positive demand shocks relax financial constraints that limit safety investment, but simultaneously raise the opportunity cost of increasing safety rather than production. We...

We study the timing-of-extraction problem facing a decentralized mine owner when extraction entails environmental damage. As expected, when the environmental damage from mining is known, the socially optimal timing will depend on the magnitude of the damage relative to these costs in the rest of...

We provide new evidence of one channel through which circular labor migration has long run effects on origin communities: by raising completed human capital of the next generation. We estimate the net effects of migration from Malawi to South African mines using newly digitized Census and...

This paper analyzes the financing terms that support international trade and sheds light on how and why these arrangements affect trade. Using detailed transaction level data from a U.S. based exporter of frozen and refrigerated food products, primarily poultry, it begins by describing broad...

We survey recent literature on the causes of the collapse in international trade during the 2008-2009 global recession. We argue that the evidence points to the collapse in aggregate expenditure, concentrated on trade-intensive durable goods, as the main driver of the trade collapse. Inventory...

We develop a dynamic model of a small open economy that trades commodities whose world prices are subject to realistic random fluctuations, and study the implications of monetary policy alternatives. The model is much more flexible than those of previous studies, especially in allowing to...

This paper tries to make sense of the recent trade dispute between the U.S. and Japan in autos and auto parts. The paper argues that there are structural differences between the way that the auto industries are organized in the U.S. and Japan, and that these differences have contributed to the...

Does input trade synchronize business cycles across countries? I incorporate input trade into a dynamic multi-sector model with many countries, calibrate the model to match bilateral input-output data, and estimate trade-comovement regressions in simulated data. With correlated productivity...