Agents are often better informed than the clients who hire them and may exploit this informational advantage. Real estate agents have an incentive to convince clients to sell their houses too cheaply and too quickly. We test these predictions by comparing home sales in which real estate agents...

We investigate learning by doing using detailed data from a major auto producer’s assembly plant. We focus on the acquisition, aggregation, transmission, and embodiment of the knowledge stock built through learning. We find that most knowledge was not retained by plant workers despite their...

Economists have shown that large and persistent differences in productivity levels across businesses are ubiquitous. This finding has shaped research agendas in a number of fields, including (but not limited to) macroeconomics, industrial organization, labor, and trade. This paper surveys and...

In markets where spatial competition is important, many models predict that average prices are lower in denser markets (i.e., those with more producers per unit area). Homogeneous-producer models attribute this effect solely to lower optimal markups. However, when producers instead differ in...

Many studies have documented large and persistent productivity differences across producers, even within narrowly defined industries. This paper both extends and departs from the past literature, which focused on technological explanations for these differences, by proposing that demand-side...

There are tremendous across-plant differences in measured productivity levels, even within narrowly defined industries. Most of the literature attempting to explain this heterogeneity has focused on technological (supply-side) factors. However, an industry's demand structure may also influence...

The U.S. has been experiencing a slowdown in measured labor productivity growth since 2004. A number of commentators and researchers have suggested that this slowdown is at least in part illusory, because real output data have failed to capture the new and better products of the past decade. I...