How should industrial policies be directed to reduce distortions and foster economic development? We study this question in a multi-sector model with technology adoption, where the production of goods and modern technologies features rich network structures. We provide simple formulas for the...

We discuss the considerable literature that has developed in recent years providing rigorous evidence on how industrial policies work. This literature is a significant improvement over the earlier generation of empirical work, which was largely correlational and marred by interpretational...

This paper investigates a unique policy designed to maintain employment during the privatization of East German firms after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The policy required new owners of the firms to commit to employment targets, with penalties for non-compliance. Using a dynamic model, we...

We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy during the long 19th century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. We show that states deployed a vast variety of different policies aimed at, primarily, but not exclusively, fostering industrialization....

Attribute-based subsidies (ABS) are commonly used to promote the diffusion of energy-efficient products, whose manufacturers often wield significant market power. We develop a theoretical framework for the optimal design of ABS to account for endogenous product attributes, environmental...

This paper develops a multi-agent dynamic model of the commercial aircraft industry and then uses that model to analyze industry pricing, industry performance, and optimal industry policy. In the model, firms are differentiated in their products and cost structure, and entry, exit, prices, and...

Centralized wage-setting institutions compress relative wages. Motivated by this fact, we investigate the effects of centralized wage setting on the industry distribution of employment. We examine Sweden's industry distribution from 1960 to 1994 and compare it to the U.S. distribution over the...

An industrial policy of subsidizing physical capital investment has been utilized in many countries in order to encourage export growth and spread economic development to outlying areas. For Israel, we possess a unique time series-cross section micro data set that details investment and its...