This research argues that deep-rooted factors, determined tens of thousands of years ago, had a significant effect on the course of economic development from the dawn of human civilization to the contemporary era. It advances and empirically establishes the hypothesis that, in the course of the...

The Tiebout hypothesis, which states that individuals will costlessly sort themselves across local communities according to their public good preferences, is the workhorse of the local public finance literature. This paper develops a test of the Tiebout hypothesis using historical variation in...

We develop and apply a procedure to flexibly estimate intra-national border barriers and intra-regional trade costs. Bilateral border barriers very significantly depress Canadian inter-provincial trade for some pairs, though the overall effect is rather small. Bilateral distance imposes much...

This paper connects changes in employer characteristics through job transitions to employee earnings following mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Using firm balance sheet data linked to individual earnings data in Canada and a matched difference-in-differences design, we find that after M&As...

Using data drawn from the Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. Censuses, we find a numerically comparable and statistically significant inverse relation between immigrant-induced shifts in labor supply and wages in each of the three countries: A 10 percent labor supply shift is associated with a 3 to 4...

We study the effects of the unionization of faculty at Canadian universities from 1970-2022 using an event-study design. Using administrative data which covers the full universe of faculty salaries, we find strong evidence that unionization leads to both average salary gains and compression of...

We analyze the impact of World War II service on income and mobility among male Army and Army Airforce veterans from various racial and ethnic groups, using linked 1940 Census, WWII enlistment, and 1969 administrative tax return data. The dataset includes non-Hispanic White, Black, Hispanic,...

The theoretical framework of urban and regional economics is built on transportation costs for manufactured goods. But over the twentieth century, the costs of moving these goods have declined by over 90% in real terms, and there is little reason to doubt that this decline will continue....

The paper develops a tractable econometric model of optimal migration, focusing on expected income as the main economic influence on migration. The model improves on previous work in two respects: it covers optimal sequences of location decisions (rather than a single once-for-all choice), and...

We introduce a reduced-form modeling framework for mortgage-backed securities in which we solve for the implied prepayment function from the cross section of market prices. From the implied prepayment function, we find that prepayment rates are driven not only by interest rates, but also by two...