Over the last three decades there has been a dramatic increase in the length of time necessary to publish a paper in a top economics journal. This paper documents the slowdown and notes that a substantial part is due to an increasing tendency of journals to require that papers be extensively...

This paper estimates the nature and magnitude of the local externalities from own industry scale, as envisioned by Marshall. Census panel data on individual plants in high-tech and machinery industries across up to 487 countries are utilized, to quantify the direct effects of local external...

In a standard two-sector neoclassical model with distortions, capital mobility can render the steady state indeterminate, in the sense that there exist infinitely many convergent paths. In the closed economy with no international capital mobility, the utility function must be linear or close to...

This paper develops a rent-protection theory of corporate ownership structure - and in particular, of the choice between concentrated and dispersed ownership of corporate shares and votes. The paper analyzes the decision of a company's initial owner whether to maintain a lock on control when the...

This study uses data from Academic Analytics to examine gender differences in promotion to associate professor in economics. We found that women in economics were 15% less likely to be promoted to associate professor after controlling for cumulative publications, citations, grants and grant...

Using Fontana et al.'s (2019) database, we analyze levels and trends in the global distribution of authorship in economics journals, disaggregating by country/region, quality of journal, and fields of specialization. We document striking imbalances. While Western and Northern European authors...

Publishing in economics proceeds much more slowly on average than in the natural sciences, and more slowly than in other social sciences and finance. It is even relatively slower at the extremes. We demonstrate that much of the lag, especially at the extremes, arises from authors' dilatory...

This study constructs a large new dataset to investigate whether state policy led to ethnic Ukrainians experiencing higher mortality during the 1932-33 Soviet Great Famine. All else equal, famine (excess) mortality rates were positively associated with ethnic Ukrainian population share across...

Entitlement programs have become an increasing component of total government spending in the US over the last six decades. To some observers, this growth of the welfare state is excessive and unwarranted. To others, it is a welcome counter-acting force to the rapid increase in income inequality....

This paper begins by identifying the distinguishing characteristic of the "real business cycle" (RBC) class of macroeconomic models. It then scruitinizes existing evidence, presented in support of the RBC approach, of three types: calibrated general equilibrium models with no monetary sector,...