The paper summarizes research on the heterogeneous experiences of actors in agriculture in Europe and the Americas between the First and Second World Wars. Following a period of increasing globalization of agricultural markets, the First World War sharply limited farming in the main combatant...

Disequilibrating macro shocks affect different firms' prospects differently, increasing idiosyncratic variation in forward-looking stock returns before affecting economic growth. Consistent with most such shocks from 1947 to 2020 enhancing productivity, increased idiosyncratic stock return...

We integrate a high-frequency monetary event study into a mixed-frequency macro-finance model and structural estimation. The model and estimation allow for jumps at Fed announcements in investor beliefs, providing granular detail on why markets react to central bank communications. We find that...

Collateral requirements play an important role in credit markets. This paper shows that the endowment effect--the phenomenon where owing a good increases one's valuation of it--inhibits demand for loans which use a borrower's existing assets as collateral. Using a field experiment in Kenya, we...

This review considers the evolution of economic thinking on the relationship between digital technology and inequality across four decades, encompassing four related but intellectually distinct paradigms, which I refer to as the education race, the task polarization model, the...

The boundary discontinuity method of causal inference may yield misleading results if a policy's impacts do not stop at the border of the implementing jurisdiction. We use geographically precise longitudinal employment data documenting worker job-to-job mobility to study policy spillovers in the...

How do communication costs affect the production of new ideas and inventions? To answer this question, we study the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post in Great Britain in 1840. This reform replaced the previous system of expensive distance-based postage fees with a uniform low rate of one...

Using an administrative payroll dataset for 2.6 million retail workers, we find that the staggered rollout of a major e-commerce firm's fulfillment centers reduces traditional retail workers' income in geographically proximate counties by 2.4%. Wages of hourly workers, especially part-time...

The share of children living in a two-parent family has declined sharply in the past 40 years, driven by a decline in marriage among parents without a four-year college degree. This paper presents a number of facts about these trends, drawing on US Census data, the Current Population Survey, the...

We review the growing literature on the political economy of immigration. First, we discuss the effects of immigration on a wide range of political and social outcomes. The existing evidence suggests that immigrants often, but not always, trigger backlash, increasing support for anti-immigrant...