Barcodes and barcode scanners transformed the grocery industry in the 1970s. I use store-level data from the 1972, 1977, and 1982 Census of Retail Trade, matched to data on store scanner installations, to estimate scanners' effect on labor productivity. I find that early scanners increased a...

We propose a theory of 'regulatory endogenous sunk costs'(RESC), in which a captured regulator raises minimum quality standards when market size increases in order to protect incumbent firms. Our RESC theory's predictions that market size is unrelated to industry concentration and positively...

We ?nd a curious negative casual relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and total factor productivity growth (TFPG) across the world for the period 1996-2009. The relationship is robust to speci?cations in which we instrument for FDI using lagged values and geography variables as...