The New Institutional Economics (NIE) has its early roots in Cliometrics. Cliometrics began with a focus on using neoclassical theory to develop and test hypotheses in economic history. But empirical consideration of economic and political development within and across countries is limited,...

Policies aimed at raising agricultural productivity have been a centerpiece in the fight against global poverty. Their impacts are often measured using field or quasi-experiments that provide strong causal identification, but may be too small-scale to capture the general equilibrium (GE) effects...

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) increasingly impose "Responsible Sourcing" (RS) standards on their suppliers worldwide, including requirements on worker compensation, benefits and working conditions. Are these policies just "hot air" or do they impact exposed suppliers and their workers? What...

The close connection between US and China in scientific research and education in the 2000s produced a large group of China-born researchers who work in the US ("diaspora") and a larger group of China-born researchers who gained US-research experience and returned to do their research in China...

What are a country's policy options in the face of emerging technologies development in a global economy? To answer this question, we examine optimal dynamic policies in an open economy where technology is endogenously accumulated through R&D innovation. Our key insight is that a country has...

This paper studies technology absorption worldwide in the late nineteenth century. We construct several novel datasets to test the idea that the codification of technical knowledge in the vernacular was necessary for countries to absorb the technologies of the Industrial Revolution. We find that...

How does the sustainable level of consumption depend on productivity growth and the size and growth rate of the population? What is the effect of uncertainty over these growth rates? I address these questions using a model in which productivity and population growth are stochastic, and social...

The standard revealed-preference approach to welfare economics encounters fundamental difficulties when the act of choosing directly affects welfare through emotions such as guilt, pride, and anxiety. We address this problem by developing an approach that redefines consumption bundles in terms...

Validation of happiness measures is inherently challenging because subjective sensations are unobserved. We introduce a novel validation method: subjects report how happy they would feel (or did feel) after some specified event, as well as how they would respond (or would have responded) to a...

This review article, which was solicited by the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, surveys work that has been done using an empirical framework for analyzing selection in insurance markets developed by Einav, Finkelstein, and Cullen (2010). We briefly review that framework, and then describe a...