In cross-sectional studies, countries with greater income inequality typically exhibit less support for government-led redistribution and greater acceptance of wage inequality (e.g., United States versus Western Europe). If individual nations evolve along this pattern, a vicious cycle could form...

Colonial Americans complained that gold and silver coins (specie) were chronically scarce. These coins could be acquired only through importation. Given unrestricted trade in specie, market arbitrage should have eliminated chronic scarcity. A model of efficient barter and local inside money is...

We present a new framework to identify demand and supply elasticities of agricultural commodities using yield shocks - deviations from a time trend of output per area, which are predominantly caused by weather fluctuations. Demand is identified using current-period shocks that give rise to...

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...

The adoption and diffusion of inputs in the production network is at the heart of technological progress. What determines which inputs are initially considered and eventually adopted by innovators? We examine the evolution of input linkages from a network perspective, starting from a stylized...

The demand for durable goods is more cyclical than that for nondurable goods and services. Consequently, the cash flows and stock returns of durable-good producers are exposed to higher systematic risk. Using the benchmark input-output accounts of the National Income and Product Accounts, we...

Total pollution emitted by U.S. manufacturers declined over the past 30 years by about 60 percent, even though real manufacturing output increased 70 percent. This improvement must result from a combination of two trends: (1) changes in production or abatement processes ("technology"); or (2)...

We provide a general framework for the study of cascade effects created by interconnections between sectors, firms or financial institutions. Focusing on a multi sector economy linked through a supply network, we show how structural properties of the supply network determine both whether...

We introduce firm and worker heterogeneity into a model of innovation-driven endogenous growth. Individuals who differ in ability sort into either a research sector or a manufacturing sector that produces differentiated goods. Each research project generates a new variety of the differentiated...

This paper develops tools and techniques to study the impact of exogenous changes in factor supply and factor demand on factor allocation and factor prices in economies with a large number of goods and factors. The main results of our paper characterize sufficient conditions for robust monotone...