The debate between "structural" and "reduced-form" approaches has generated substantial controversy in applied economics. This article reviews a recent literature in public economics that combines the advantages of reduced-form strategies -- transparent and credible identification -- with an...

A power law is the form taken by a large number of surprising empirical regularities in economics and finance. This article surveys well-documented empirical power laws concerning income and wealth, the size of cities and firms, stock market returns, trading volume, international trade, and...

New data sources and products developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census highlight the fluid character of U.S. labor markets. Private-sector job creation and destruction rates average nearly 8% of employment per quarter. Worker flows in the form of hires and...

This study examines the various uses of subjective outcomes as a focus of interest for economists. It outlines the possible channels by which economists can usefully add to what are already massive literatures on such outcomes in the other social sciences. Generally we contribute little if we...

The growth of the availability and use of detailed household financial transaction microdata has dramatically expanded the ability of researchers to understand both household decision-making as well as aggregate fluctuations across a wide range of fields. This class of transaction data is...

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...

Publishing takes a long time in economics. Consequently, many authors release "working" versions of their papers. Using data on the NBER working paper series, we show that the dissemination of economics research suffers from an overcrowding problem: An increase in the number of weekly released...

Advances in the study of partial identification allow applied researchers to learn about parameters of interest without making assumptions needed to guarantee point identification. We discuss the roles that assumptions and data play in partial identification analysis, with the goal of providing...

In this paper, we highlight the potential for linked employer-employee data to be used in entrepreneurship research, describing new data on business start-ups, their founders and early employees, and providing examples of how they can be used in entrepreneurship research. Linked...

We review both the theoretical and empirical literature on entrepreneurship and financial frictions, with an emphasis on the heterogeneous and dynamic micro-level implications of financial frictions for macro development