Since 1980, US wage growth has been fastest in large cities. Empirically, we show that most of this urban-biased growth reflects wage growth at large Business Services firms, which are also the most intensive users of information and communications technology (ICT) capital in the US economy. We...

This paper evaluates the role of regional cluster composition in the economic performance of industries, clusters and regions. On the one hand, diminishing returns to specialization in a location can result in a convergence effect: the growth rate of an industry within a region may be declining...

Several recent studies have examined the tendency of regions within a nation to exhibit long-term convergence in per capita income levels. Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1991, 1992, 1995) have found a tendency towards convergence among the U.S. states, among Japanese prefectures, and among regions...

A key economic issue is whether poor countries or regions tend to grow faster than rich ones: are there automatic forces that lead to convergence over time in levels of per capita income and product? After considering predictions of closed- and open-economy neoclassical growth theories, we...

A recent econometric literature shows two distinct paths for identification with shift-share instruments, leveraging either many exogenous shifts or exogenous shares. We present the core logic of both paths and practical takeaways via simple checklists. A variety of empirical settings illustrate...

This paper proposes a method to estimate treatment effects in difference-in-differences designs in which the treatment start is staggered over time and treatment effects are heterogeneous by group, time, and covariates, and when the data are repeated cross-sections. We show that a...

We document substantial racial disparities in consumer bankruptcy outcomes and investigate the role of racial bias in contributing to these disparities. Using data on the near universe of US bankruptcy cases and self-reported and manually-identified measures of race, we show that minority filers...

We study the interpretation of regressions with multiple treatments and flexible controls. Such regressions are often used to analyze stratified randomized control trials with multiple intervention arms, to estimate value-added (for, e.g., teachers) with observational data, and to leverage the...

We derive general, yet simple, sharp bounds on the size of the omitted variable bias for a broad class of causal parameters that can be identified as linear functionals of the conditional expectation function of the outcome. Such functionals encompass many of the traditional targets of...