We leverage the timing of pandemic-induced school closures to learn about the emergence of ordinal rank effects in education. Using administrative data from Italian middle schools for four cohorts of students, our study reveals that disrupting peer interactions during the first year of middle...

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1: Introduction: Globalization and Otavalo Life -- Chapter 2: How the Otavalos Became Otavalos -- Chapter 3: Textiles and Tourism Move to the Fore -- Chapter 4: In Search of the Noble Savage: Tourism and Travel to Otavalo -- Chapter 5: Otavalo...

Years after the Great Recession, the economy is still weak, and an unprecedented number of workers have sunk into long spells of unemployment. Cut Loose provides a vivid and moving account of the experiences of some of these men and women, through the example of a historically important group:...

Software engineering is prototypical of knowledge work in the digital economy and exhibits strong geographic concentration, with Silicon Valley as the epitome of a tech cluster. We investigate productivity effects of knowledge worker agglomeration. To overcome existing measurement challenges, we...