This paper studies China's four-fold increase in per capita GDP relative to the U.S. between 1995 and 2019. First, we argue that China's growth pattern is very similar to that of several other East Asia economies that initially grew very quickly. Second, we show that a minimalist...

We propose that a person's desire to consume an object or possess an attribute increases in how much others want but cannot have it. We term this motive superiority-seeking, and show that it generates preferences for exclusion that help explain a host of market anomalies and make novel...

Smart-home technologies have been heralded as an important way to increase energy conservation. While in vitro engineering estimates provide broad optimism, little has been done to explore whether such estimates scale beyond the lab. We estimate the causal impact of smart thermostats on energy...

This paper proposes an analytic representation of perturbations in heterogeneous agent economies with aggregate shocks. Treating the underlying distribution as an explicit state variable, a single value function defined on an infinite-dimensional state space provides a fully recursive...

This paper characterizes the stationary equilibrium of a continuous-time neoclassical production economy with capital accumulation in which households can insure against idiosyncratic income risk through long-term insurance contracts. Insurance companies operating in perfectly competitive...

This study explores the consequences of dollarizing an economy with an initial dollar shortage. We show that the resulting transitional dynamics are tantamount to that of a "sudden stop": consumption of tradable goods fall, the real exchange rate depreciates abruptly by a discrete drop in...

After 162 years of political unification, Italy still displays large regional economic differences. In 2019, the per capita GDP of Lombardia was 39,700 euros, but Calabria's per capita GDP was only 17,300 euros. We build a two-region, two-sector model of the Italian economy to measure the wedges...

A slanted-L curve is well-suited to represent the non-linearity of the celebrated Phillips curve. We show this using cross-country data of major industrialized economies since 2009, including the inflationary surge of the 2020s. At high unemployment rates, an increase in demand reduces...

We investigate the effects of input variety creation and destruction on both micro- and macroeconomic outcomes using detailed data from Belgium. We estimate that marginal costs rise by 0.6% for every 1% of suppliers lost. We show that this elasticity measures the area under the input demand...