This paper examines a possible connection between China's massive rural to urban migration and high chemical fertilizer use rates during the late 1980s and 1990s. Using panel data on villages in rural China (1987-2002), we find that labor out-migration and fertilizer use per hectare are...

The history of innovation in the chemical industry offers many insights for accelerating energy innovation. In this chapter, we begin by laying out the early history of the chemical industry for an overview of the role innovation has played in its development. We then explore three noteworthy...

This paper explores some costs associated with environmental regulation. We focus on regulation pertaining to ground-level ozone (O3) and its effects on two manufacturing industries -- industrial organic chemicals (SIC 2865-9) and miscellaneous plastic products (SIC 308). Both are major emitters...

The effects of market and technological conditions on the investment and markup behavior of firms, and their resulting impacts on economic performance, are closely interrelated and complex. In this paper determinants of and linkages among these are explored for two industries with very different...

This paper provides causal evidence of the impact of industrial policy on firms' long-term performance and quantifies industrial policy's long-term welfare effects. Using a natural experiment and unique historical data during the Heavy and Chemical Industry (HCI) Drive in South Korea, we find...

This paper considers the effect of the First World War on large-scale businesses in Second-Industrial-Revolution industries like steel, electricity, and chemicals. For firms in the nations of the Entente, we argue, the war mainly interrupted long-term trends that resumed in the aftermath of the...

DuPont, one of the most respectable U.S. companies, caused environmental damage that ended up costing the company around a billion dollars. By using internal company documents disclosed in trials we rule out the possibilities that this bad outcome was due to ignorance, an unexpected realization,...

This paper investigates self-reported wedges between how much people work and how much they want to work, at their current wage. More than two-thirds of full-time workers in German survey data are overworked--actual hours exceed desired hours. We combine this evidence with a simple model of...

We study how AI-generated misinformation affects demand for trustworthy news, using data from a field experiment by a major German outlet, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). Readers were randomly assigned to a treatment highlighting the challenge of distinguishing real from AI-generated images. The...

In a large German bakery chain, many workers report negative perceptions of monitoring via checklists. We survey workers and managers about the value and time costs to all in-store checklists, leading the firm to randomly remove two of the most perceivedly time-consuming and low-value checklists...