This paper examines the structure, behavior and performance of the N95 respirator market in the U.S. before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-early 2022). It focuses on the behavior and performance of government and private sector organizations in the allocation of scarce supplies of N95...

Wage gaps between workers with a college or graduate degree and those with only a high school degree rose rapidly in the United States during the 1980s. Since then, the rate of growth in these wage gaps has progressively slowed, and though the gaps remain large, they were essentially unchanged...

Will smart machines replace humans like the internal combustion engine replaced horses? If so, can putting people out of work, or at least out of good work, also put the economy out of business? Our model says yes. Under the right conditions, more supply produces, over time, less demand as the...

In 1966, the philosopher Michael Polanyi observed, "We can know more than we can tell... The skill of a driver cannot be replaced by a thorough schooling in the theory of the motorcar; the knowledge I have of my own body differs altogether from the knowledge of its physiology." Polanyi's...

This paper explores the geographic overlap of trade and technology shocks across local labor markets in the United States. Regional exposure to technological change, as measured by specialization in routine task-intensive production and clerical occupations, is largely uncorrelated with regional...

This paper considers the labor market and distributional implications of a scenario of ever-more-intelligent autonomous machines that substitute for human labor and drive down wages. We lay out three concerns arising from such a scenario and evaluate recent predictions and objections to these...

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions...

In this paper we emphasize the contribution of technical change, broadly defined, towards productivity growth in explaining the relative East Germany-West Germany performance during the post-World War II era. We argue that previous work was excessively focused on physical capital investments...

This paper advances the hypothesis that the EUS crisis was caused by German unification. The unification has implied a massive resource demand which parallels the US resource demand following Reagan's tax reforms in the eighties. The resource demand revised the German interest rates relative to...

This paper examines the impact of exposure to foreign media on the economic behavior of agents in a totalitarian regime. We study private consumption choices focusing on former East Germany, where differential access to Western television was determined by geographic features. Using data...