In Chinese cities, migrants with rural hukou, compared to residents with local urban hukou, face more uncertainty, have limited access to mortgage finance, and are less eligible for low-cost housing. A simple model demonstrates that for these reasons, rural- to-urban migrants are less likely to...

Overall mobility declined during the COVID-19 pandemic because of government lockdowns and voluntary social distancing. Yet, aggregate data mask important heterogeneous effects across segments of the population. Using unique mobility indicators based on anonymized and aggregate data provided by...

This paper evaluates the effect on crime of creating a fundamental modern-day institution: centralized professional police forces tasked with preventing crime. We study the 1829 formation of the London Metropolitan Police - the first professional force worldwide. Using newly digitized and...

We use the 2021 vintage of the EIB Investment Survey (EIBIS) which contains a detailed set of questions regarding the nature of the policy support to firms during the COVID-19 crisis. Matched with hard data on the balance sheets and Profit and Loss (P&L) statements of corporations, the survey...

Facing unprecedented uncertainty and drastic trade-offs between public health and other forms of human well-being, policy makers during the Covid-19 pandemic have sought the guidance of epidemiologists and economists. Unfortunately, while both groups of scientists use many of the same basic...

This paper studies how wealth and health inequalities have interacted with the Covid-19 epidemic in a way that has reinforced inequalities in income, savings, epidemic risk and even individual preventive behaviors. We present in more detail two papers and their theoretical and empirical results....

We present a Simple SIR Macro Model to study the economic impact of an epidemic in a model were agent types are unobservable. We solve for the decentralized economy equilibrium and for optimal solution (subject to the constraint that the planner cannot differentiate between agent types). We find...

Fixed Capital has a major role in economic growth literature and on the estimation of potential output using a production function - which is essential to design macroeconomic policy. One of the main contributions of this work, differently from the previous works, is to estimate the capital...

We study the interaction between epidemics and economic decisions in a model where (1) agents allocate their time to market and home production and social and home leisure, (2) these activities differ in their degree of contagiousness, (3) some infected individuals are indistinguishable from...