Research in sociology and economics point to important role for social networks in labor markets. Social contacts mediate propagation of rich and reliable information among indi- viduals and thus help workers find jobs and employers find employees. Recent theoretical advances show that for...

Previous work on social interactions has analyzed the effects of nuclear family, peer, school, and neighborhood characteristics. This paper complements this research by first showing that individuals from similar nuclear families often differ in extended family member characteristics. It then...

We examine the informational role of targeted tax transfers used by local governments to attract corporate investment projects. The transfer may potentially be used to solve an information externality in which subsequent investments that follow the initial project may fail to occur even though...

Concern over the potential need to redefine universal service to account for Internet-related services and other combinations of communication and computing motivates this study of the geographic spread of commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the leading suppliers of Internet access in...

I measure the industry impacts of an environmental tax reform where a carbon tax is used to finance full or partial corporate tax integration. I find that the industry impacts of such a reform are likely to be modest (in the sense of impacts on returns on equity).

We examine the long run consequences of the scramble for Africa among European powers in the late 19th century and uncover the following empirical regularities. First using information on the spatial distribution of African ethicities before colonization, we show that borders were arbitrarily...

This paper presents an empirical assessment of movie theatre attendance in two major metropolitan markets and provides strong support for the importance of spatial characteristics in determing attendance. We consider the hypothesis that attendance at particular movie theatres reflects a tension...

This paper analyzes the causal relations between firms' productivity, factor intensity and export participation. Using propensity score matching techniques and firm level panel data for Chinese manufacturing firms over the 1998-2007 period, we find strong evidence of domestic firms self...

A market based approach focusing on a cap and trade system with auctioned permits would raise sums of money in the early years of the program. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the ten year revenue impact of the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733) at $854 billion for an...