We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compare the cost of living and welfare across countries, while incorporating product variety measured by the count of barcodes or firms. For 47 countries, we compare welfare relative to the United States to conventional measures of real...

Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. We show that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distribution of sellers. These weights are based on...

This paper uses data from 802,777 veterans assigned to 7,548 primary care providers (PCPs) within the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to examine variations in the efficacy of primary care providers (PCPs), their consequences for health outcomes, and their determinants. Leveraging...

Although there is a large gap between Black and White American life expectancies, the gap fell 48.9% between 1990-2018, mainly due to mortality declines among Black Americans. We examine age-specific mortality trends and racial gaps in life expectancy in rich and poor U.S. areas and with...

We examine the impact of the opening of a new urgent care center (UCC) on health care costs and the utilization of care among nearby Medicare beneficiaries. We focus on 2006-2016, a period of rapid UCC expansion. We find that total Medicare spending rises when residents of a zip code are first...

The 'China shock' operated in part through the housing market, and that is an important reason why the China shock was as big as it was. If housing prices had not responded at all to the China shock, then the total employment effect of the China shock would have been reduced by more than...

This paper is the first attempt to structurally estimate the impact of globalization on markups, and the effect of changing markups on welfare, in a monopolistic competition model. To achieve this, we work with a class of preferences that allow for endogenous markups and firm entry and exit that...

Since 1995, growth in productivity in the United States appears to have accelerated dramatically. In this paper, we argue that part of this apparent speed-up actually represents gains in the terms of trade and tariff reductions, especially for information-technology products. We demonstrate how...

In the second-half of the 1990s, the positive impact of information technology on productivity growth for the United States became apparent. The measurement of this productivity improvement depends on hedonic procedures adopted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Bureau of Economic...

This paper describes the updating of the NBER trade dataset, which now provides U.S. import and export values to the year 2001, disaggregated by Harmonized System (HS), Standard International Trade Classification (SITC), and the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) categories. In...