This paper studies technology absorption worldwide in the late nineteenth century. We construct several novel datasets to test the idea that the codification of technical knowledge in the vernacular was necessary for countries to absorb the technologies of the Industrial Revolution. We find that...

This paper overviews the economics of scientific grants, focusing on the interplay between the inherent uncertainty in research, researchers' incentives, and grant design. Grants differ from traditional market systems and other science and innovation policy tools, such as prizes and patents. We...

We study companies' decisions about holding annual shareholder meetings on-line during the Covid pandemic, and returning to classical in-person meetings post-pandemic. Among S&P 1500 companies, the frequency of virtual meetings shot up from less than 10 percent to more than 80 percent in the...

I review the academic literature on defined contribution retirement plan design and participant behavior. While adoption of automatic enrollment has significantly increased participation rates, recent studies find the long-run effects on savings are smaller than the short-run effects, with some...

Australia had adopted a novel approach to e-cigarette policy by requiring a physician's prescription to lawfully obtain nicotine e-cigarettes. We conducted an online discrete choice experiment to gauge how adult Australian smokers made hypothetical choices between cigarettes, prescription...

Career opportunities and expectations shape people's decisions and can diminish over time. In this paper, we study the career implications of automation and robotization using a novel data set of resumes from approximately 16 million individuals from the United States. We calculate the lifetime...

What happens when the findings of a prominent medical study are overturned? Using a medical trial on breech births, we estimate the effect of the reversal of such a medical study on physician choices and infant health outcomes. Using the United States Birth Certificate Records from 1995-2010, we...

The United States criminal justice system is characterized by substantial disparities in outcomes across racial and ethnic groups. Understanding these disparities requires accurate measures of race and ethnicity of people involved in the justice system. We document how race and ethnicity are...

Applied general-equilibrium (AGE) models have often made compromises to circumvent difficult modeling problems. One of these is avoiding endogenous zeros, ruling out important questions. Traditional perfect competition models: when do technologies or trade links switch from active to inactive or...

We use the term structure of bank CD rates to examine whether maturity-transformation risk is priced into the rates banks offer customers. We find that depositors pay a significant cost for the liquidity provided by bank deposits. This cost is strongly related to the amount of...