This paper is the first chapter in the Oxford Companion to the Economics of China (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Rather than trying to summarize other contributors' views, we provide our own perspectives on the Economics of China--the past experience and the future prospects. Our...

The paper introduces a framework for studying the hierarchy of growth factors, from deep to more immediate. The specific setting we examine is 18th and 19th century Germany, when institutional changes introduced by reforms and transportation improvements converged to create city growth. We...

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions trumps' everything else. Once institutions are...

This chapter (to appear in the forthcoming Handbook of International Economics, Vol. 5) develops a framework with which to interpret and survey answers to the question: how does increased openness affect aggregate welfare in a typical developing country? We decompose answers into four...

Governments use their countries' economic strength from existing financial and trade relationships to achieve geopolitical and economic goals. We refer to this practice as geoeconomics. We build a framework based on three core ingredients: input output linkages, limited contract enforceability,...

Global supply chains have come under unprecedented stress as a result of US-China trade tensions, the Covid-19 pandemic, and geopolitical shocks. We document shifts in the pattern of US participation in global value chains over the last four decades, in terms of partner countries, products, and...

We document three facts about the global diffusion of surveillance AI technology, and in particular, the role played by China. First, China has a comparative advantage in this technology. It is substantially more likely to export surveillance AI than other countries, and particularly so as...

We study the reasons for the large, coincident increases in unbalanced international trade and overall trade from 1970 to 2019. We show that these two salient features--a rise in net and gross international trade--are largely a consequence of a reduction in intratemporal trade barriers rather...

Monetary and fiscal policies require coordination to achieve desired macroeconomic outcomes. The literature since Leeper (1991) has focused on two regimes: monetary dominance and fiscal dominance. In both cases, one policy is active while the other is passive and accommodates the former. We...

"We identify a new set of stylized facts on the 2008-2009 trade collapse that we hope can be used to shed light on the importance of demand and supply-side factors in explaining the fall in trade. In particular, we decompose the fall in international trade into product entry and exit, price...