Public support of research typically relies on the notion that universities are engines of economic development, and that university research is a primary driver of high wage localized economic activity. Yet the evidence supporting that notion is based on aggregate descriptive data, rather than...

High growth and progressive regions possess a culture that promotes innovation. Innovation depends on a region’s ability to use its own existing knowledge and knowledge generated elsewhere. This paper demonstrates the importance of the ability to absorb external knowledge in explaining...

Social interactions are considered pivotal to agglomeration economies. We explore a unique dataset on mobile phone calls to examine how distance and population density shape the structure of social interactions. Exploiting an exogenous change in travel times, we show that distance is highly...

We study the impact of expert reviews on the demand for HIV treatments. A novel feature of our study is that we observe two reviews for each HIV drug and focus attention on consumer responses when experts disagree. Reviews are provided by both a doctor and an activist in the HIV lifestyle...

We estimate whether consumers respond to local energy costs when purchasing appliances. Using a dataset from an appliance retailer, we compare demand responsiveness to a measure of energy costs that varies with local energy prices versus purchase prices. We strongly reject that consumers are...

Consumer reviews, especially those expressing concerns of product quality, are crucial for the credibility of online platforms. However, reviews that criticize a product or service may also dissuade buyers from using the platform, creating an incentive to blur the visibility of critical reviews....

We develop a variation of the Grossman-Helpman Protection for Saleʺ model, where organized groups, representing various sectors of the economy, influence government policy. In particular, this paper focuses on the rise of food prices and a greater level of influence of a food sector lobby,...

Prior research shows long-run productivity growth in agriculture is associated with increases in the stock of public scientific knowledge and private patented inventions. However, private inventions may be a function of the stock of public knowledge. In this paper, we examine the possibility...

In this paper, we analyze the relationships between the prices of biodiesel, ethanol and related fuels and agricultural commodities with a use of minimal spanning trees and hierarchical trees. We find that in short-term, both ethanol and biodiesel are very weakly connected with the other...