Michael Strain and Stan Veuger find that the economic effects of globalization do indeed change the attitudes of whites toward immigrants, minorities, religion, and guns. More specifically, they find evidence of significant hardening of existing attitudes – that is, the impact of these import...

We report three findings: (1) Using evidence from chain bankruptcies and data on 12-18 million establishments per year, we show that large retailers produce significant positive spillovers. (2) Local governments respond to the size of these externalities. When a town's boundaries allow it to...

Information frictions between firms and regulators are typically seen as a means by which firms evade enforcement or, alternatively, a means through which they can limit rent-seeking behavior. In contrast, we argue that information frictions between firms and regulators reduce the efficiency of...

Local governments rely heavily on sales tax revenue. We use national bankruptcies of big-box retail chains to study sudden plausibly exogenous revenue shortfalls. Treated localities respond by reducing spending on law enforcement and administrative services. We further study how cities with...

Using a new survey of truck drivers, we find that those who are most concerned about automation are, counterintuitively, also most likely to say they intend to re-invest in driving. This arms race for remaining positions is socially inefficient. We find that the effect disappears among drivers...

The likely impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on state and local government revenues is increasingly well understood.

This paper studies the urban development impacts of the civil disturbances that took place in Washington, DC following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

We create a state-level measure of economic and police uncertainty during the 2007-2009 recession. Despite claims in the literature, the variation in this uncertainty measure matches the cross-sectional distribution of unemployment outcomes in this period. This relationship is robust to numerous...

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through coordinated rallies across the country on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. We...

Have workers stopped moving to the highest-density, highest-productivity places in the country because of a decline in the urban wage premium, or because the rent is too high?