How do communication costs affect the production of new ideas and inventions? To answer this question, we study the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post in Great Britain in 1840. This reform replaced the previous system of expensive distance-based postage fees with a uniform low rate of one...

The cross-sectional association between pain and unemployment is well-established. But the absence of panel data containing data on pain and labor market status has meant less is known about the direction of any causal linkage. Those longitudinal studies that do examine the link between pain and...

Using a new survey of European households, we study how exogenous variation in the macroeconomic uncertainty perceived by households affects their spending decisions. We use randomized information treatments that provide different types of information about the first and/or second moments of...

The Global Repository of Income Dynamics (GRID) is a new open-access, cross- country database that contains a wide range of micro statistics on income inequality, dynamics, and mobility. It has four key characteristics: it is built on micro panel data drawn from administrative records; it fully...

We compute new estimates for Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth in five European countries and in the United States. Departing from standard methods, we account for positive profits and use firm surveys to proxy for unobserved changes in factor utilization. These novelties have a major...