Showing 1 - 10 of 235
, on average. The results provide new objective indicators of government efficiency across countries, based on a simple and …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012460391
We use newly digitized records from the U.S. Post Office to study how strengthening state capacity affects public service delivery and innovation in over 2,800 cities between 1875-1905. Exploiting the gradual expansion of a major civil service reform, cities with a reformed postal office...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013172151
The spatial mismatch hypothesis posits that employment decentralization isolated urban blacks from work opportunities. This paper focuses on one large employer that has remained in the central city over the twentieth century - the U.S. Postal Service. We find that blacks substitute towards...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012465186
Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth provides a compelling interpretation of how technical change and innovation has radically changed the living standards of the citizens of the US in the past 150 years. Lying behind these changes are the institutions which have allowed...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456740
This paper estimates returns to scale for manufacturing industries around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States by exploiting an industry-city panel data for the years 1880-1930. We estimate decreasing returns to scale on average over the period, contrary to most of the existing...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012510512
Entrepôts are hubs that facilitate trade between multiple origins and destinations. We study these entrepôts, the network they form, and their impact on international trade. We document that the trade network is a hub-and-spoke system, where 80% of trade is shipped indirectly--nearly all via...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012599305
Might firms' use of data create market power? To explore this hypothesis, we craft a model in which economies of scale in data induce a data-rich firm to invest in producing at a lower marginal cost and larger scale. However, the model uncovers much richer interactions between data, welfare and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013210050
Increasing returns are as fundamental a cause of international trade as comparative advantage, but their role has until recently been neglected because of the problem of modelling market structure. Recently substantial theoretical progress has been made using three different approaches. These...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012477327
In this paper we estimate variants of a labor demand equation derived from a (restricted variable) cost function in which "experience"on a technology (proxied by the mean age of the capital stock) enters "non-neutrally." Our specification of the underlying cost function isbased on the hypothesis...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012477361
decompose the change in welfare into changes in technical and allocative efficiency due to reallocation. We non … somewhere between 70% to 90% of the aggregate returns to scale are due to changes in allocative efficiency. In bigger markets … firms enter. However, important as they are, the improvements in allocative efficiency are not driven by oft …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012481722