The collapse of economic activity in 2020 from COVID-19 has been immense. An important question is how much of that resulted from government restrictions on activity versus people voluntarily choosing to stay home to avoid infection. This paper examines the drivers of the collapse using cellular...

We examine how incumbents respond to the threat of entry by competitors (as distinct from how they respond to actual entry). We look specifically at passenger airlines, using the evolution of Southwest Airlines' route network to identify particular routes where the probability of future entry...

Aggregate data show a large and decades-long decline in construction sector productivity. This decline in such a large sector has had a material effect on secular productivity growth for the economy as a whole. Prior work has focused on the role of potential measurement problems in construction,...

This paper tests for and measures monopsony power in the U.S. higher education labor market. It does so by directly estimating the residual labor supply curves facing individual four-year colleges and universities using school-specific labor demand instruments. The results indicate that schools...

This paper describes a new publicly available dataset on shutdown orders and related policies at the county and city level across the United States during the early part of the COVID-19 crisis, from March through May of 2020. In hundreds of counties around the country, local governments issued...