COVID-19 relief legislation offers a unique setting to study how political representation shapes the distribution of federal assistance to state and local governments. We provide evidence of a substantial small-state bias: an additional Senator or Representative per million residents predicts an...

Veuger and Shoag study the local economic spillovers generated by LeBron James' presence on a team in the National Basketball Association. They trace the impact a star of Mr. James' caliber can have on economic activity by analyzing the impact his departures and arrivals had on business activity...

In this paper, the authors exploit the Federal Housing Administration's (FHA's) surprise 50 basis point cut to its annual mortgage insurance premium in January 2015 to study the impact of federal housing policy and interest rates on housing demand for a population of households likely to be...

The key simplifying assumption is that individuals care about how generous they are conditional on being solicited, so that the number of times a person is solicited is the price of expressing a given level of altruistic identity. There are two main results. First, restricting entry among...

We describe the broad range of uncertainties faced by the developers of medical technologies. Empirically, we estimate the asset market incidence of two realizations of uncertainties we classify as within-market policy risks. The events we analyze concern the intellectual property of Myriad...

This paper examines firms' choices to use mobile platforms — namely iOS and Android. Using Crunchbase® data on startups seeking external funding, we find that 16 of 47 business categories are likely to use mobile platforms. 10 of these 16 exhibit no platform preferences, implying...

The emerging-market and developing economies face a multitude of grave challenges as they confront the COVID-19 pandemic, including a critical lack of budgetary space. Observers have highlighted the need to bolster the international financial institutions' lending capacity in the event of a...

Most credit portfolios contain obligor concentration risk and yet international bank regulatory capital rules and many industry models assume perfect diversification. Multiple methods are available to calculate the approximate capital needs of a concentrated credit portfolio, but many of these...

Alex Brill and Scott Ganz estimate per-capita state-level and county-level non-mortality and total economic burdens of the opioid crisis in 2015.

Gating indicators recommended by CDC for phased reopening following COVID-19 shutdowns include "sustained decreases" or a "downward trajectory...over a 14-day period" in public health statistics.