In many low- and middle-income countries blood donations per capita are substantially lower than in advanced economies. In these countries blood supply is mostly collected through donations by relatives and friends of individuals needing transfusions or to replace blood used in emergencies. The...

The growing demand for plasma, especially for the manufacture of therapeutic products, prompts discussions on the merits of different procurement systems. We conducted a randomized survey experiment with a representative sample of 826 Canadian residents to assess attitudes toward legalizing...

We show that sticky prices exacerbate household hoarding of storable goods. When stores are slow to adjust prices following a cost shock, households have an incentive to stockpile just as in a typical retail sale. This incentive is present even in the absence of traditional panic or...

We study how heterogeneity in performance evaluations across supervisors affects employee and supervisor careers and firm outcomes using data on the performance system of a Scandinavian service sector firm. We show that supervisors vary widely in how they rate subordinates of similar quality. To...

The incidence of taxes on consumers and producers plays a central role in evaluating energy tax policy, yet the literature testing the main predictions of the tax incidence model is sparse. In this paper, we examine the pass-through rate of state gasoline and diesel taxes to retail prices, and...

Trade is measured on a gross sales basis while GDP is measured on a net sales basis, i.e. value added. The rapid internationalisation of production in the last two decades has meant that gross trade flows are increasingly unrepresentative of the value added flows. This fact has important...

More advanced technologies demand higher degrees of specialization - and longer chains of production connecting raw inputs to final outputs. Longer production chains are subject to a "weakest link" effect: they are more fragile and more prone to failure. Optimal chain length is determined by the...

This paper provides both a conceptual framework for decomposing a country's gross exports into value-added components by source and a new bilateral database on value-added trade. Our parsimonious framework integrates all previous measures of vertical specialization and value-added trade in the...

This paper proposes a framework for gross exports accounting that breaks up a country's gross exports into various value-added components by source and additional double counted terms. By identifying which parts of the official trade data are double counted and the sources of the double...

This paper updates the conceptual foundations for measuring real effective exchange rates (REERs) to allow for vertical specialization in trade. We derive a value-added REER describing how demand for the value added that a country produces changes as the price of its value added changes relative...