We exploit policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the effects of unemployment insurance policies on unemployment. We find large effects of unemployment benefit extensions on unemployment. In fact, the estimates imply that most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the...

Starting in the early 1990s credit scoring became widespread and central in credit granting decisions. Credit scores are scalar representations of default risk. They are used, in turn, to price credit, and as a result alter household borrowing and default decisions. We build on recent work on...

This paper documents a hallmark feature of China’s state capitalism as the state controlling the economy in a vertical structure: State-owned enterprises (SOEs) monopolize key industries in the upstream, whereas the downstream industries are largely open to private competition. We develop...

We propose a test that uses information on workers' mobility, wages and firms' profits to identify the sign and strength of assortative matching. The basic intuition underlying our empirical strategy is that, in the presence of positive (negative) assortative matching, good workers are more...

I construct a tractable model to investigate the impact of the presence of foreign firms in economies where there exist financial frictions. The cross-country implications of the model are consistent with two facts that I document using plant-level data: (i) foreign firms enter more in economies...

The United States has borrowed heavily from the rest of the world since the early 1990s. We build a model where this borrowing is driven by foreign demand for saving – a global savings glut – that matches the dynamics of the U.S. trade balance, real exchange rate, sector-level...

We analyze the relation between the increase in inequality and the observed trends in intergenerational mobility in the U.S. in the last three decades. As an empirical contribution, we document a significant increase in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings, both at the family level and...

According to a Survey by the Society for Human Resource Man- agement (2010), 60% of human resource representatives interviewed in 2009 indicated that the companies they worked for ran credit checks on potential employees. In this paper, we explore how credit checks (observable signals based on...

Reputation is generally considered an asset, especially in e-commerce markets. Any reputation system, however, elicits strategic responses from the sellers. Using panel data on a large random sample of online sellers from China’s largest e-commerce platform, Taobao.com, we study how...

It is well known that hours per working-age person in continental Europe have shown a rather different time series pattern than in the US. While in 1970, hours per working-age person were similar, they subsequently fell in continental Europe but did not show a clear trend in the US. Strikingly,...