This paper investigates whether education weakens the relationship between early-life disadvantages and later-life SES. We use three proxies for advantage that we show are independently associated with SES in middle-age. Besides early, favorable family and neighborhood conditions, we argue that...

Firms that export or, even more so, are part of a multinational enterprise tend to exhibit higher productivity than their purely domestic counterparts. To better understand this correlation, we incorporate the perspective of industrial organization that one of the main drivers of differences in...

This published essay discusses the processes that led to the decline of New England's traditional industries and to the creation of its depressed milltowns. It argues that the decline of the New England textile and shoe industries was part of the maturation of industrial capitalism, making New...

I consider as misplaced the current emphasis on income and wealth inequalities as compared to the socially more relevant consumption inequalities, which have been significantly reduced over the last decades and most likely for a much longer period of time. One important factor has been the...

Police violence against minorities in the United States has garnered increasing attention; however, the US is not the only country facing this challenge. Ethnic minorities in many countries cannot always call on the police with confidence that they will be protected. Individuals across 40...

COVID-19 has become a global health pandemic forcing governments introducing unprecedented steps to contain the spread of the virus. On the 23rd of March, 2020, the UK government addressed the nation to announce extraordinary measures as a response to slow down the spread of the coronavirus,...

Despite the enormous gains in the economic well-being of the elderly, and the progressivity of the Social Security benefit schedule, there remains substantial inequality in financial resources. In this paper we use data from the Health and Retirement Survey to examine the distribution of pension...

How does firm entry affect innovation incentives and productivity growth in incumbent firms? Micro-data suggests that there is heterogeneity across industries--incumbents in technologically advanced industries react positively to foreign firm entry, but not in laggard industries. To explain this...

Using the daily data covering both the first and second wave of COVID-19 pandemic over the period from March 3, 2020, to February 12, 2021, this study documents a strong positive comovement between implied volatility indices and two proxies of the COVID-19 fear. However, in all the cases, the...

The coordination of legal systems is a concept that has occupied the minds of legislators, political leaders and legal academics for centuries, particularly with a view towards facilitating business across borders. Within the European Union, coordination has been achieved to some extent in those...