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Abstract This paper studies the macroeconomic impact of the Irish bank strike of 1966, which led to the closure of the major commercial banks for 3 months. We collect a variety of new evidence, such as high‐frequency macro data, economic forecasts, micro data and narrative sources. Our findings suggest that the bank strike was associated with a shortfall in economic activity that punctuated a decade of robust growth. The qualitative evidence depicts the struggles of households and firms managing a credit crunch, a liquidity shock, and rising transaction costs. This case study highlights the importance of banks for economic performance.

This study examines cross-market shock transmission and benchmark heterogeneity across six major global oil and natural gas contracts: Brent crude oil futures, WTI crude oil futures, Shanghai INE crude oil futures, the Japan-Korea Marker LNG futures, IPE natural gas futures, and NYMEX natural gas futures. Using a multi-method framework combining directional connectedness, the Diebold-Yilmaz generalized spillover index, impulse response analysis, dynamic time warping clustering, and club convergence, we analyze how structural differences across markets in terms of geographic scope, development stage, and institutional context shape the direction and persistence of shock propagation over the period March 2018 to December 2023. Results show that Brent crude oil futures act as the dominant net transmitter of shocks across the system, while Shanghai INE and the Japan-Korea Marker consistently absorb external shocks as net receivers, reflecting regional segmentation and infrastructure constraints that limit their price discovery capacity. Three distinct market clusters are identified, with oil benchmarks grouping separately from regional gas contracts, and club convergence analysis reveals a common long-run equilibrium across all markets despite short-run heterogeneity. These findings carry implications for benchmark formation, hedging strategy, and regional market integration policy in the global oil and natural gas complex.

As urbanization accelerates worldwide, the ecological consequences of administrative boundary reforms remain poorly understood. This study exploits China's County-to-District reform as a quasi-natural experiment to estimate its impact on vegetation cover, using a county-level panel from 2008 to 2020 and a staggered difference-in-differences design. The reform significantly reduces local vegetation cover, with attenuated effects in counties characterized by steeper slopes, greater topographic relief, designated nature reserves, or higher fiscal expenditure. Mechanism analysis reveals a development-oriented political economy channel: the reform intensifies socioeconomic activity, which in turn reshapes land use through built-up expansion and cropland contraction. Evidence from the primary land market corroborates this channel, showing that the reform increases primary land conveyance revenue mainly through commercial and industrial land conveyances. These findings underscore the need to incorporate ecological and fiscal assessments into reform approval procedures and to decouple administrative upgrading from land supply expansion, so that institutional transitions do not come at the expense of long-term environmental quality.

This study, utilizing data from Chinese A-share listed companies between 2009 and 2023, reveals that corporate perceptions of climate risk significantly lower the labor income share by influencing employment adjustments and capital deepening. Transition risk perception operates mainly through employment reductions and workforce restructuring, while physical risk perceptions predominantly decrease average wages; both types increase the capital-labor ratio. The impact is stronger in labor-intensive, high‑carbon industries, disaster-prone areas, and large, highly leveraged firms, but less so where government-market relations are more integrated. Additionally, higher perceived risks tend to widen internal inequality by increasing executives' compensation share and continuously reducing that of regular employees. These findings highlight corporate climate risk perception as a new driver of declining labor income share, shedding light on how climate change influences income distribution at the micro level.

Swarm electrification–the interconnection of isolated decentralized energy systems for local energy sharing– could accelerate rural electrification, yet it remains largely absent from major initiatives that still prioritize solar home systems and centralized mini-grids. To determine when swarm interconnection is most justified, we develop a techno-economic decision-support framework, introducing three heterogeneity indexes: budget heterogeneity (BHI), demand shape diversity (SDI), and demand peak diversity (PDI). We use these indexes to investigate how heterogeneity increases the value of interconnection in the swarm-grid setting. We translate model outputs into policy-relevant indicators, e.g., avoided investment and added social welfare, and combine these into a single benefit ratio (BR). Using mixed complementarity problem (MCP) models–common in market and other equilibrium settings–we simulate decentralized energy trading under two competitive assumptions: perfect competition and Cournot competition, thus deriving tariff levels endogenously. We also include a central-planning benchmark where prices are exogenously fixed. Results from a Madagascar case study indicate that heterogeneity reshapes the economic rationale for interconnection. Demand differences yield at least 3% avoided investment through more efficient allocation and reduced oversizing, and complementary load-profiles increase energy sharing more than fivefold. Budget heterogeneity dominates, inducing over fifteen times more energy sharing by redistributing investments across nanogrids. Different market designs highlight a profitability-affordability trade-off: payback periods as short as 1.5 years are maximized under cost-recovery-oriented settings, imposing higher tariffs and underscoring the need for governance mechanisms aligned with energy-justice objectives. This framework offers practical guidance for a more adaptive and socially-inclusive rural electrification.

Climate change has become an increasingly important source of financial risk, attracting growing interest in how carbon emissions are priced in equity markets. Although the literature is expanding, firm-level evidence from emerging markets remains limited. In this paper, we examine whether corporate carbon emissions intensity predicts future idiosyncratic stock return volatility among Indian listed firms over the period 2009–2023. We find that firms with higher CO2 emissions intensity, measured as Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon-dioxide-equivalent (CO2e) emissions scaled by revenue, exhibit significantly higher one-period-ahead idiosyncratic stock return volatility. Specifically, a one-standard-deviation increase in emissions intensity increases annualised idiosyncratic volatility by 1.32 percentage points, representing 4.6% of the sample mean. The relationship is driven primarily by direct (Scope 1) rather than purchased energy (Scope 2) emissions and is stronger for firms covered by India’s Perform, Achieve and Trade (PAT) scheme and during periods of elevated economic policy uncertainty, but weaker for firms that use renewable energy. We also find evidence that stock illiquidity is a potential channel through which carbon emissions influence future firm-specific stock return risk. The results remain robust to alternative measures of emissions intensity and risk, sample-selection corrections, a lead test, an instrumental-variables analysis, and additional robustness checks. Overall, our findings suggest that firm-level carbon emissions are an important determinant of firm-specific stock return risk in an emerging equity market.

Estimates of the economic consequences of climate change diverge widely and are influenced by methodological choices. Here, we explore different approaches to quantifying economic damages by leveraging a structural model of the global economy. We decompose macroeconomic outcomes by region, factor, and sector to reveal differences between top-down aggregate productivity shocks and a bottom-up representation of impact channels. While aggregate economic outcomes are comparable, region-specific results differ substantially between approaches at the tails of the distribution, driven by divergent international trade responses. Allowing for economic adaptation in production and trade flows, our findings indicate that international spillovers raise global welfare losses from climate change by 1%–7% relative to the sum of domestic impacts. Overall, our results suggest that a disaggregated representation of climate change impact channels is important for improving the understanding of aggregate economic outcomes and for informing effective adaptation policies that account for international trade spillovers.

Daylight Saving Time (DST) shifts clock time relative to daylight and routine activities, with ambiguous effects on electricity consumption: later evening daylight may reduce lighting demand but may also affect cooling, heating, and activity-related load. This paper evaluates the effect of DST on electricity consumption in Iran using nationwide hourly load data from 2015 to 2021, weather and calendar controls, and a Regression Discontinuity in Time (RDiT) design around legally fixed spring-forward and fall-back transition dates. We distinguish local boundary effects from the season-average daily effect over the full DST-active period. The national season-average daily ATE is positive, corresponding to a 2.24% increase in national daily electricity consumption during DST, but is not statistically significant at the 5% level under Newey–West inference. In contrast, the boundary RDiT estimates reveal significant local discontinuities: the spring-forward transition is associated with a 3.87% increase in residualized electricity consumption, while the DST-normalized fall-back estimate indicates an 11.14% decrease under DST relative to standard time. These transition-specific effects should not be netted out to infer the full-season effect. Heterogeneity analyses show that effects vary across tariff periods and consumer categories, with stronger spring-forward responses during on-peak hours and different fall-back responses for RECs and EDCs. Overall, the results do not support a simple electricity-saving interpretation of DST in Iran; the estimated effect depends on the estimand, timing of demand, and consumer composition.

This paper introduces a new approach for bubble detection based on mixed causal and noncausal autoregressive processes and their tail process representation during an explosive episode. Departing from traditional definitions of bubbles as nonstationary and temporarily explosive processes, we adopt a perspective in which prices are assumed to follow a strictly stationary process, with the bubble considered an intrinsic component of its nonlinear dynamics. The proposed approach provides a bubble indicator for detecting bubbles and measuring their duration. We implement our strategy to investigate the phenomenon called the “green bubble” in the field of renewable energy investment.

Ultra-high voltage (UHV) transmission infrastructure is central to China's strategy for resolving spatial mismatches in electricity supply and demand. Given its substantial capital requirements, a systematic evaluation of UHV projects' economic impact and cost-effectiveness is critical. Existing literature predominantly emphasizes causal inference on specific economic outcomes, with limited assessment of aggregate economic contributions. To address this gap, we quantify the macroeconomic effects of UHV investments through a productivity enhancement mechanism. Using a propensity score matching difference-in-differences (PSM-DID) approach with time-varying treatment, we first estimate UHV-induced firm productivity gains based on firm-level data from China. These micro-level effects are then embedded into a multi-regional, multi-sectoral general equilibrium model, capturing direct and spatial spillover effects via interregional trade and intersectoral linkages. Results indicate: (1) UHV projects elevate firm productivity by 3.62% on average; (2) UHV infrastructure raises national GDP by approximately 0.78%, including a 0.14% gain in provinces without direct UHV construction; (3) Assuming a 7% discount rate and a 30-year lifespan, UHV investments yield a 268% macroeconomic return. Our findings highlight the macroeconomic value of UHV expansion and provide empirical support for future investment prioritization.

Unlike numerous European Union member states, Norway lacks an explicit definition of energy poverty and targeted alleviation policies. Historically associated with energy abundance thanks to its early capitalisation on hydropower attributes, the country offers a fertile context to investigate the changing impact of Europe's turn towards energy security amid geopolitical turbulence and resultant impacts at household level. We report on the first study to address this directly in Norway by analysing its energy poverty policy mix. The policy mix literature has identified coherence, credibility and comprehensiveness as desirable aspects for effectiveness. Based on a top-down approach through a desk study of relevant policies, and a bottom-up approach using an expert focus group discussion, we identify and explain the implications of Norway's diffuse energy poverty policy mix. Measures address symptoms rather than underlying causes through short-term populist policies and misdirect support in ways that risk increasing inequity while failing to ameliorate energy poverty for vulnerable households. While Norway's broader welfare system offers social protection, the lack of a definition of energy poverty, ambiguous institutional responsibility, and weak coherence of policy measures limit policy mix effectiveness, while failing to furnish a firm base for its credible and comprehensive treatment.

Using panel data of 83 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries from 2005 to 2023, we investigate the convergence dynamics of energy poverty to determine whether countries are escaping the energy poverty trap and the role of China's outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in the convergence process. We find that while traditional convergence tests confirm a catch-up effect, the Phillips-Sul club convergence model identifies five distinct clubs among BRI countries: 1) severe energy poverty trap; 2) high energy poverty with slow convergence; 3) medium energy poverty with sluggish improvement; 4) low energy poverty with steady progress; 5) lowest energy poverty frontier with the fastest convergence. Furthermore, China's OFDI in infrastructure and economic growth sectors within BRI countries promotes the formation of lower energy poverty convergence clubs. Infrastructure-oriented OFDI is particularly effective in the most severe and the least energy poverty clubs, while market-oriented OFDI demonstrates a more consistent and widespread effect across all clubs. Differentiated strategies and strengthened multilateral coordination are essential to maximize poverty reduction outcomes.

Hybridizing existing hydropower plants with energy storage or other generation can expand the flexibility, reliability services, and economic value provided by existing hydropower assets. However, permitting delays and direct regulatory costs can create barriers. So far in the US, nine hydro-hybrids have received Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approval and thirteen total hydro-hybrids have been developed. Analyzing these nine cases along with similar projects shows that regulatory delays have increased recently. While hydro-hybrids have not yet been affected by the worst of the delays, the risk of large delays ( > 500 days) has increased significantly. The worst delay observed was 762 days, which effectively increased the project cost by up to 28%. FERC could reduce this barrier by lowering regulatory costs and the risk of large delays with a stronger and broader categorical exclusion under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and by narrowly defining FERC’s jurisdiction over hybrid assets. A broader categorical exclusion for typical hybridization projects would reduce repeated work across projects and streamline the part of the process that carries the most timeline risk. Narrowly defining FERC’s jurisdiction over secondary storage or generation assets would increase certainty about the process and streamline many projects. For example, hybridization projects that do not affect hydropower operations and already go through environmental reviews at the state or local level may not need federal regulation to ensure responsible development and operation. This would significantly reduce the cost and risk of large delays to licensees without negative environmental or social outcomes.

We study the early origins of prosocial behavior by using exogenous exposure to the Great Chinese Famine during early childhood. Using a cohort-based difference-in-differences approach, we find that individuals exposed to the famine between ages 1 and 3 years at its onset exhibit significantly higher charitable donations six decades later. This effect is especially strong for individuals who had siblings during the famine. We provide suggestive evidence that the family environment and opportunities for intra-household interaction may have contributed to this pattern, while finding little support for income or religiosity as alternative explanations. These findings highlight the role of family interactions in fostering altruism, especially in the context of early-life adversity.

Using more than 266,000 Ottoman court-register observations spanning 1513–1884, we measure intergenerational mobility in Istanbul over nearly four centuries. Honorific titles, validated against probate wealth records, provide our measure of socioeconomic status. Persistence in title status follows a fall–rise–fall pattern. It declined as the devşirme levy and competition for admission to religious schools brought outsiders into the ruling class. It increased between 1650 and 1800, when great households became the main setting for social reproduction, and declined again after the post-1826 reforms. Over the same period, the share of sons in a different title category than their father rose substantially. In contrast, the father–son wealth-rank correlation rose during 1650–1800 and declined after 1800. A decomposition of titled father–son pairs helps reconcile these patterns. The boundary between the elite and the non-elite became more difficult to cross during 1650–1800, while movement between the military/administrative and religious/judicial branches remained relatively stable. The increase in mobility came primarily from sons of untitled fathers acquiring titles, rather than from elite sons losing them. Thus, the expansion of the titled population occurred alongside an elite that became increasingly hereditary for roughly a century and a half. This is the first large-sample, multi-century series on intergenerational mobility in the Middle East.

ABSTRACT Are firms risk averse? We propose a dynamic model of firm investment under uncertainty that captures firms' risk attitudes through quantile preferences. The firm maximizes its present value, defined as current profits and investment plus the discounted value of the ‐quantile of its value next period. The model implies that the firm's investment policy equates the marginal cost of capital with the ‐quantile of the discounted present value of future marginal profits. Therefore, investment depends directly on the firm's risk attitude. Empirical estimations using the Euler equation derived from the quantile investment model reveal evidence of downside risk aversion.

We show that astrology—a belief without scientific grounding—impacts global equity prices. We focus on a widely held belief that Mercury Retrograde adversely affects financial gain. Using 48 countries’ stock market indices, we find that stock market returns are 3.47% lower annually during Mercury Retrograde periods than in other periods. This effect can be explained by a culture-based investor belief channel: belief-holding investors become more pessimistic about equities during retrograde periods, lowering sentiment and returns. We show that cross-country differences in exposure to ancient Greek culture are associated with heterogeneity in investors’ belief in Mercury Retrograde. Consistent with the investor belief channel, the effect is stronger when fundamental value is more subjective to assess, and in countries whose markets are more sentiment-sensitive. In the cross-section of stock returns, anomalies for which the speculative leg is the short (long) leg experience higher (lower) returns during retrograde periods.

We study how celebrity endorsements affect cryptocurrency markets across settings with and without established prices. Using a hand-collected dataset of celebrity endorsements from 2013 to 2025, we show that endorsements of already trading tokens generate short-lived price responses that dissipate quickly, consistent with attention shocks rather than information revelation. We then examine endorsements of utility-token ICOs and find that endorsements substitute for pre-sales, support larger fundraising targets, and are associated with substantially greater capital raised. Despite these outcomes, endorsed ICOs exhibit weaker ex-post outcomes and a higher incidence of fraud, especially when the endorser lacks domain-relevant expertise. Overall, celebrity endorsements appear to scale attention and capital formation without reliably signaling high quality.

This paper examines the impact of a major geopolitical risk shock, comparable in scale to the outbreak of the Russia–Ukraine war, on household financial distress in five European countries. We combine a VAR, household survey data, and theoretical insights to develop macro–micro simulations that quantify how such shocks influence household balance sheets. The VAR traces the macroeconomic effects of a surge in geopolitical risk, which we apply to household-level data using the HFCS. We find the shock is associated with elevated inflation, tighter monetary policy, higher mortgage rates, and falling house prices. Our simulations show these dynamics significantly increase financial distress, with variation across countries. We incorporate endogenous consumption responses and show that adjustments driven by interest rate exposure, inflation, and housing wealth play a key role in shaping household resilience. We also document that younger and lower-income households tend to increase consumption following the shock, exacerbating their financial vulnerability.

Utilizing the Cultural Revolution as the source of social violence, we explore the effect of childhood and early adolescence (ages 5–15) experience of social violence on CEO’s risk-taking behavior. We document that CEOs who experienced higher levels of social violence during this formative period are less likely to engage in M&A and innovation activity. Our results are robust to alternative explanations and statistical exercises. Further analyses show that this effect takes effect by affecting people’s mental health. Given that our treatment is distinct from the events in prior studies (e.g., natural disasters or economic depression), this study enriches our understanding of the origin of managerial risk-taking incentives.

Sexual harassment is perceived to be a major impediment to female labor force participation. Using data on workplace sexual harassment precedent in US Circuit Courts, we exploit the random assignment of judges and the fact that a judge’s gender and party of appointment predict decisions in sexual harassment cases to estimate the causal impact of pro-plaintiff sexual harassment precedent on the adoption of sexual harassment human resources policies and reduction in gender inequality. Consistent with an insider–outsider model of involuntary unemployment, forbidding sexual harassment encouraged entry of outsiders and reduced gender inequality along the dimensions of hours worked and wages, particularly in the construction industry, which was heavily affected by sexual harassment litigation, but these ameliorative effects are reduced for insider women. Pro-plaintiff decisions spurred the adoption of sexual harassment human resources policies and increased female employment shares. The effects were comparable to the Equal Employment Opportunity Act’s impact on black employment share.

This paper examines whether greater diversity of disclosed information sources in analyst reports is associated with lower forecast bias. Using in-depth reports on Chinese listed firms from 2007 to 2023, we construct a report-level measure of disclosed source diversity from chart and table citations via GPT-4o-assisted extraction. We document a negative association between greater source diversity and forecast bias, concentrated in current-period forecasts. Exploiting the 2020 expansion of China's industrial data infrastructure, we show that treated firms experience higher source diversity and lower forecast bias. We further find that more diverse reports document scarcer sources, and that reports citing scarcer sources are associated with lower bias. The negative association is stronger for low-coverage firms and for reports accompanied by positive EPS revisions. We contribute to the literature on analyst research quality by identifying disclosed source diversity as a distinct dimension associated with forecast accuracy.

Private communications between managers and sell-side analysts are widespread yet are largely unobservable to outside market participants. This study constructs a measure of face-to-face private communication between managers and sell-side analysts by mapping New York City (NYC) taxi trip records to company headquarters and brokerage locations of NYC analysts. Focusing on earnings announcements, where demands for such communication is particularly high, we find that abnormal ride volumes following earnings announcements are associated with analyst- and firm-level consequences. At the analyst-level, abnormal ride increases are associated with more accurate forecasts, with stronger effects when earnings news is more uncertain or unexpected, consistent with interpretive role of private communications. Also, abnormal ride increases are associated with timely earnings forecasts, more profitable stock recommendations, and forecast revisions that elicit stronger market reactions without subsequent drift. At the firm level, companies with greater taxi activity by forecast-issuing analysts exhibit stock prices more reflective of future earnings and larger reductions in forecast dispersion and bid-ask spreads. Overall, the findings suggest that private communications help analysts produce timely and precise public signals about firms' future earnings that translate into broader benefits for firm-level information environments and price efficiency.

We examine how variation in trade distortions across countries and industries is associated with the investment behavior of private equity funds, taking explicit account of their country and industry mandates. We use a sample of 9142 transactions across 60 countries and 52 industries completed by 1623 PE funds during 2010–2020. Overall, we find a negative and statistically significant association between trade policies that restrict imports in a given country-industry combination and the odds of a PE fund investment in that market. This association differs by trade policy instrument. We observe a positive and statistically significant link between tariffs and the likelihood of investment in the affected country-industry combination. In contrast, subsidies to import-competing firms are negatively associated with investment.

Organ transplantation saves lives and improves the quality of life of patients who would otherwise depend on costly and invasive treatments. The technology is becoming available in low- and middle-income countries, but the gap between the demand for and the supply of organ transplants remains large. In a randomized controlled trial at a Tunisian university, we evaluate an expert-led intervention designed to inform about organ donation and strengthen trust in medical institutions. The intervention consists of a short video testimonial from a heart transplant survivor, a presentation led by a medical doctor and a short Q&A session. We find that the intervention significantly increases deceased donor registration, with suggestive evidence of positive spillover effects on the control group. The survey data provides little support for changes in attitudes and social expectations as potential mechanisms. Instead, it reveals large and statistically significant increases in medical and legal knowledge, religious beliefs supportive of donation, and institutional trust among treated students. Finally, we show that treatment effects on organ donor registration are driven by male students and those whose families likely support organ donation. Targeting older segments of the population may further increase the impact and cost-effectiveness of this intervention.

The spatial agglomeration of restaurants and retail establishments provides a physical platform for consumers searching for differentiated local goods and services. However, the rapid penetration of digital platforms, such as Yelp and Meituan, has substantially lowered search frictions and fundamentally changed the search behavior of consumers. This paper establishes a directed consumer search model to investigate the impact of the introduction and merger of digital platforms on urban agglomeration and provides empirical evidence with novel datasets on merchant relocation, platform registration, and consumer reviews. It is found that (1) digital platforms drive merchants to locate in cluster locations with lower horizontal and vertical accessibility; (2) digital platforms complement urban agglomerations regarding business density, diversity, and clustering patterns.

We examine how information about local labor market conditions shapes search and employment outcomes for Indian job seekers. Participants were randomly shown information about either job postings, job applicants, or both from a popular job portal for their preferred city and occupation. Treated respondents are more likely to be employed seven months later. This overall effect varies considerably by baseline employment status. Among the initially employed, treatments reduce search off the portal and increase employment, with suggestive evidence of higher persistence in baseline jobs. In contrast, among the initially unemployed, treatments increase search activity but do not raise employment. Employment gains are concentrated among job seekers with less optimistic beliefs about labor market conditions. These findings suggest that limited information about labor market fundamentals may contribute to job churn in lower-income countries.

We study the effects of a large unconditional cash transfer program on social preferences of children in rural Kenya using a randomized controlled trial. We measure the social preferences of 4022 children with survey questions and incentivized behavioral games three years after the cash transfer. First, we find no persistent economic effects of the program. Additionally, we find no consistent evidence that children from the treatment group or that children from the spillover group are more or less prosocial than children from the control group. However, we find some evidence of reduced psychological well-being among adults and children in spillover households.

We set up a simple theoretical model in which banks with varying degrees of government support are matched with CEOs that have different degrees of overconfidence. The channel through which the matching occurs is the share of bonus payments offered by banks in their profit-maximizing contracts. This yields a sequence of hypotheses when CEOs can freely choose risk levels: banks with more government support incentivize their CEOs more and this disproportionately attracts overconfident CEOs. In equilibrium this in turn leads to an assortative matching between overconfident managers and banks with a larger bailout probability. We then test the hypotheses derived from this model for U.S. data spanning both the Great Financial Crisis and the Covid Crisis. Our results confirm the hypotheses from our theoretical model for normal years, but not during crises and periods of enhanced regulation.

To explore a broader dimension of board gender diversification, we investigate whether increased gender-equal government policy in relation to shared parental leave (SPL) affects the governance behavior of male board directors. We analyze the influence of the 2015 UK SPL policy using data on 1930 UK firms and semi-structured interviews with board directors. Consistent with social influence theory, we observe changes in male directors’ governance decisions after SPL. Attributable to better corporate governance, financial performance improves in firms with predominantly male boards. Director interviews reveal increased board level focus on gender equality and SPL, often facilitated by considerate, yet powerful, male directors. Broadening research on corporate governance and gender, our study suggests the positive influence of increased commitment to gender equality on the corporate governance behavior of the predominant cohort of male directors. For board gender diversity to contribute to meaningful performance improvements diversity must be embedded at deep organizational levels, and women directors must be granted sufficient power to effect strategic change. Governments need to ensure gender egalitarian policies foster structural equality and encourage fathers to take parental leave. In addition to focusing on gender representation targets, firms must address boardroom gender power imbalance.

Consumer preferences are often context-dependent, with attention naturally drawn to a product’s most prominent attribute. Applying the behavioral framework of “salient thinking,” this paper examines how firms strategically design channel architecture to manipulate consumer focus. We reveal a fundamental asymmetry in the incentives for firms to transition from direct competitors to cooperative complementors. Under direct competition, markets often devolve into a “commoditized,” price-salient equilibrium. However, we demonstrate that relative product quality allows firms to escape this trap. When a lower-quality firm resells a premium competitor’s product, the resulting contrast shifts consumer focus from price to quality; this “de-commoditization” fosters a market environment that can overcome double marginalization, particularly when quality-production costs remain moderate. Crucially, this mechanism is structurally asymmetric: it fails if the high-quality firm acts as the reseller, as low-quality firms prefer price-salient competition. These insights provide a novel, cognition-driven rationale for why premium and budget brands selectively co-locate in modern retail ecosystems.

This paper investigates workers’ valuations of the job attributes that distinguish atypical work arrangements from traditional employee relationships. Using a vignette-based discrete-choice module fielded to samples of UK and US workers, I estimate willingness-to-pay distributions for contract security, work-related benefits, flexibility, autonomy, and tax treatment. Across both countries, workers place substantially higher value on job security and employment protections than on flexibility-related attributes. Interestingly, this pattern holds even among the self-employed: almost two-thirds of UK self-employed workers and just under half of US self-employed workers are estimated to prefer the traditional-employment bundle. Despite institutional differences between the UK and US, average valuations are closely aligned. The heterogeneity analysis shows that most observable characteristics account for only limited variation in preferences, but risk aversion and parenthood are notable exceptions, with both substantially increasing the value workers attach to contract security.

We provide micro-founded evidence on how establishment-level adoption of frontier technologies shapes the economy-wide occupational employment structure. Linking survey data on technology adoption between 2011 and 2016 by 1660 German incumbent establishments to administrative worker records, we find that establishments adopting frontier technologies such as AI or smart factories contributed disproportionately to the overall decline in routine jobs. Crucially, these overall effects do not stem from average within-establishment adjustments but from a subset of large and less routine-intensive adopters. Our findings highlight that frontier technology adoption is not routine-replacing per se: establishment size and an initially non-routine-intensive workforce are key conditions for de-routinization to occur.

We develop an agent-based model to study the economic and public health impact of global vaccine inequality. Our model contains two world regions (higher-income vs. lower-income) and captures the co-evolution between economic activity, the spread and evolution of a hypothetical novel pandemic virus, and public health responses. We calibrate and estimate the model parameters empirically with data from the COVID-19 pandemic to capture the economic and social response to pandemic viruses in both regions. Our simulations suggest that vaccine inequality can drastically exacerbate inequality in mortality in the two regions. This is because the lower-income region suffers from drastically increased mortality, while the higher-income region generally only experiences a small (if any) decrease in mortality in most simulations. However, vaccine inequality harms both regions economically. This is driven by the fact that severe vaccine inequality eliminates the prospect of eradicating a mutating virus. Any trade-off between mortality in higher- and lower-income regions can be mitigated by increasing the production of vaccine doses. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the higher-income region benefits economically from paying for increased vaccine production.

This paper examines the long-term impacts of colonial-period railroads on agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. Using granular data from 22 countries, we show that historically rail-connected regions remain more productive today. We also find that these regions are more integrated into modern road-based urban markets. We interpret this pattern as evidence of path-dependent spatial equilibrium, where early investment in the transportation network helped coordinate the location of economic activities in the post-colonial period. However, the evidence does not rule out the possibility that colonial railways and the modern road network both followed persistent favorable geographic fundamentals. More broadly, the findings show how early transport investment can leave durable effects on rural development by shaping the geography of market access.

I examine how individuals update their environmental attitudes in response to climate events using the extensive Swedish forest fires in 2018. Political scientists have suggested that motivated reasoning contributes to divergence in environmental attitudes over time. It remains empirically unclear whether the growing prominence of climate events could potentially widen or bridge these political divides. I document rising environmental concerns following the fires. The extent of these increases did not appear to be associated with the intensity of local fires but varied significantly by individuals’ prior beliefs. Green-left-leaning individuals exhibited stronger prior concerns and showed larger increases in concern after the fires than conservative-right-leaning individuals. The growing concern suggests that climate events exacerbate political polarization in environmental attitudes rather than mitigating it. I also find no evidence that exposure to climate change news explains the observed political polarization in concerns. These patterns are consistent with motivated reasoning along partisan lines shaping differential reactions to climate disasters. In contrast, I do not find similar patterns for support for a higher carbon tax, indicating that increased concern does not necessarily translate into support for climate policy.

We study directed lead–lag relationships in US equities and their economic value at the daily horizon. We propose a directional score based on ordered level-2 signatures (Lévy area) and estimate a rolling directed network from close-to-close returns. Trading followers using inferred leaders lagged returns yields a signal-normalized long–short portfolio hedged with SPY. Using CRSP data from 1963–2022 on large-cap stocks, the signature strategy achieves about 20% annualized returns with Sharpe above 3. Our method outperforms standard benchmarks and benchmarks from the literature. The signals we discover are only weakly explainable by previously discovered lead–lag relationships and Fama–French factors.

Contrary to the conventional view that unionized firms are associated with less disclosure, we find that firms with organized labor provide earnings with better quality. We establish the causal relationship using a regression discontinuity analysis that exploits the random assignment around close-call union elections and through a difference-in-differences approach, utilizing the staggered enactment of right-to-work laws. The influence of organized labor is significantly stronger in firms with greater capacity to wield influence, enhanced incentives to monitor, and in contexts where alternative information sources are limited. The impact of organized labor on increasing labor-related costs is also significantly reduced in firms with better earnings quality. Overall, our research indicates that managers face a tradeoff between shielding shareholders from union-driven rent-seeking and building a trusting relationship with employees by accommodating employees’ demand for useful information.

Waste-to-energy (WtE) incineration is increasingly promoted as a solution to municipal solid waste management and low-carbon energy generation. However, their deployment raises growing concerns about ecological degradation. This study examines the effects of WtE plants on bird species richness and environmental pollution in China. Using a difference-in-differences (DID) framework and a city-level panel dataset from 2010 to 2024, we conduct heterogeneity analysis, and our results show that biodiversity losses are 9.7% lower around high-capacity WtE facilities compared to low-capacity ones, and 8.7% lower around high-power-generation plants relative to low-power ones. By integrating bird species richness data with vegetation indices and air pollution metrics, we demonstrate that biodiversity loss is primarily driven by environmental degradation linked to WtE operation. Moreover, we employ instrumental variable (IV) strategies to reduce potential endogeneity. We use Double Machine Learning (DML) approaches and county-level regressions as robustness checks. Our findings call for advancement in WtE technologies and retrofit of outdated facilities to improve environmental performance, alongside strategic spatial planning that situates plants in less populated areas with strong transportation networks to balance ecological protection and operational sustainability.

This study investigates the impact of air pollution on hours worked in Chile using a nationally representative sample. We construct downwind smoke plumes originating from wildfires and combine them with the presence of thermal inversions to causally identify the effect of air pollution. Our findings reveal a 2.2% reduction in hours worked due to increased fine particulate matter from an extra smoky day. Our study suggests that focusing solely on labor productivity underestimates the economic cost of air pollution by 18–43%. The effect is more pronounced for female workers as well as workers engaged in outdoor tasks. We show a high degree of heterogeneity in the effect across rural and urban areas. In urban areas, high-income workers experience a larger impact of air pollution, but not in rural areas.

This paper investigates the role of rights offerings in U.S. Chapter 11 reorganizations as a new market-based mechanism for mitigating bargaining frictions. Using novel hand-collected data, I document three facts: (i) over the past two decades, rights offerings financed 35% of large bankruptcies, (ii) they are predominantly proposed and underwritten by hedge funds, and (iii) their occurrence is highly correlated with stock market performance. In an instrumental variable setting, I find that compared with other sources of financing, rights offerings lead to higher creditor recoveries, shorter reorganization durations, and lower refiling rates. They also allow firms to access new capital without resorting to asset liquidations, which are value-reducing. My findings suggest that by alleviating key bargaining frictions in large and complex bankruptcy cases, rights offerings may improve the efficiency of resource allocation in the economy.

A variety of timing strategies shown to generate alpha and high Sharpe ratios at the monthly horizon exhibit substantially deteriorated performance at longer investment horizons. The effect is large: multi-factor alphas are more than halved going from one-month to 10-year returns, and factors that exploit time-series predictability drive them to zero. I argue that such return dynamics reflect compensation for exposure to shocks that are particularly risky from a long-horizon investor’s perspective. I illustrate the idea by showing that seasonality in the volatility of price-of-risk and expected-cash-flow shocks generates seemingly profitable timing strategies.

We estimate the productivity effects of eliminating work from home (WFH) in the public sector by evaluating a mandatory return-to-office (RTO) policy in the Catalan judiciary. Leveraging cross-court variation in pre-mandate WFH intensity, difference-in-differences estimates show that terminating WFH reduced recorded procedural output by 5.2 percent, with no detectable changes in document quality or absenteeism. A multi-stakeholder survey shows that these recorded gains from WFH coexisted with coordination costs reported by external users: recorded case-processing tasks are performed on a digital platform, easy to do remotely and to monitor, whereas coordination with lawyers is synchronous, harder to do off-site, and largely unrecorded. Perceived impacts follow a gradient: case managers and supervisors, who observe the bureaucratic-efficiency margin, are positive about WFH, while lawyers, who depend on service coordination, are clearly negative.

Individuals may care about status both because of how they view their own position and because of how others perceive it. We compare these two dimensions using five hypothetical discrete-choice experiments that separately vary absolute outcomes, self-perceived standing, and socially-perceived standing in the domains of income, academic performance, and car safety. The analysis sample includes 4934 U.S. respondents and two elicitation tasks: a non-incentivized own-choice task and an incentivized coordination game in which respondents are rewarded for predicting the modal choice. Across four of the five experimental conditions, socially-perceived standing enters positively, while self-perceived standing is either negative or statistically indistinguishable from zero. The exception is the income own-choice condition, where the pattern reverses—a result that warrants further research.

This paper develops a structural framework for analyzing top income taxation and applies it to six decades of U.S. tax history and to eight other advanced economies. The paper derives explicit expressions for top-bracket tax revenue and total excess burden across the full range of tax rates, while preserving local consistency with the sufficient-statistics approach of Saez (2001). Applied to the United States, the analysis implies that the current excess burden of the top federal tax bracket is $101 billion and that raising the top marginal tax rate to its revenue-maximizing level of 72 percent would increase annual revenue by $111 billion, given a taxable income elasticity of 0.25. The current tax rate is lower than what is consistent with a purely utility-based notion of social welfare. By contrast, Nordic countries and the United States in earlier decades appear to have operated at tax rates exceeding revenue-maximizing levels.

Exploiting variation in the timing of district attorney elections across nearly 40 states during the steepest rise in U.S. incarceration (roughly 1986–2006), this paper shows that election years increased per capita admissions and months sentenced to state prisons, with admissions rising 3 percent—approximately 63,000 additional prison admissions over the period. These effects were concentrated in the South, were stronger in Republican counties, and declined as public opinion softened, largely disappearing after the era ended. Results suggest that sentencing outcomes respond to voter preferences, implying that the politics underlying rising incarceration may be as important to understand as the policies themselves.

Regulatory inspections might affect entities nearby those inspected. Such spillovers are difficult to identify because regulators target inspections and neighboring establishments face correlated shocks. We exploit the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Site-Specific Targeting (SST) program, which generated quasi-random variation in inspections among workplaces with injury rates near a discrete cutoff. An SST inspection reduced injuries at uninspected same-ZIP-code establishments by an estimated 11 percent—an effect roughly as large as the direct effect on the inspected establishment. Because spillovers extend to multiple nearby establishments, they avert several times as many injuries as the inspection’s direct effect.

We estimate the effect of receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) in childhood on adult outcomes using multiple sources of variation. Using variation across and within two quasi-experiments, we find that the program has heterogeneous effects that vary with the parental earnings response to SSI benefits: the program has positive effects on children when parents do not adjust their labor supply in response to SSI income (meaning household income increases), but zero or negative effects on children when parents offset the transfer by reducing earnings (meaning household income remains constant or falls). These results suggest that, relative to parent non-work time, income is crucial in the human capital production of low-income children with disabilities. We estimate a model of maternal labor supply and child human capital formation to quantify the relative importance of these channels. Our findings indicate that 1) the income effects of SSI on children's human capital are substantial, with a limited role for perverse incentive effects from conditioning benefits on disability status, and 2) parental work on net improves children's outcomes by increasing household resources, despite the potential decrease in parental time.

The use of managed retreats, or “buyouts,” of flood-prone properties is likely to grow as an adaptation response to increasing flood risks. This paper investigates the role of race and ethnicity in buyout bargaining outcomes and how those outcomes affect longer-run neighborhood change. We combine nationwide administrative data on federal property acquisitions, housing sales transactions, and restricted-use Census microdata to estimate whether there are systematic differences by race in buyout payments relative to a property’s fair market value. We then use a database tracking individual movement over time to examine the quality of the neighborhoods to which participants move and how neighborhood outcomes vary by race and program participation. We find that the buyout compensation received by households of color is at least 6 percent lower than that received by white households. White participants relocate to higher quality neighborhoods and are better off than white nonparticipants. Black participants, on the other hand, move to worse neighborhoods and are worse off than Black non-participants. Our work highlights how government policy, aimed to address increasing climate impacts, may exacerbate the burden of climate change on vulnerable communities.

We establish a reliable counterfactual for evaluating racial disparities in traffic stops using telemetric data to estimate the racial composition of motorists. We measure of motorist racial composition using telemetric mobility data and a novel two-stage correction methodology anchored by an independent measure, racial composition of motorists involved in accidents. Applying this to Massachusetts State Police stops, we find non-White motorists are stopped at rates exceeding their roadway presence by 6.7 percentage points. We demonstrate that uncalibrated telemetric data significantly understates minority presence (15.2 vs. 28 percent), and the uncalibrated telemetric data yields disparities that are over twice the size of our preferred estimates. We use this validated measure to assess the accuracy of several commonly-used disparity tests. We find that the widely used “Community Standard” test dramatically overestimates disparities, even when restricting to local roads or non-commuting hours. In contrast, the less-often used “Crash Benchmark” accurately captures disparities even when aggregated to higher temporal levels covering up to 94 percent of stops. Finally, the “Veil of Darkness” test yields smaller estimates than our telemetric measure, consistent with its focus on disparate treatment rather than the broader legal standard of motorist composition.

This study examines how social influences on academic performance evolve during transition to university when students encounter new social environments and publicly observable signals of academic ability. Using administrative data from a large, elite, and linguistically and culturally heterogeneous public university in Uganda and exploiting random assignment of students to dormitories, we examine how exposure to coethnic peers and peers with scholarship status affects academic performance. We find that greater exposure to peers from similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds improve academic achievement early in university, but these effects fade over time. In contrast, exposure to scholarship peers generates persistent gains in academic performance that increase in magnitude over time. Our setting allows us to distinguish between peers’ underlying academic ability and publicly observable signals of ability since scholarship status is visible, while underlying academic preparation is not. We find that exposure to scholarship peers improves academic performance regardless of those peers’ underlying ability, while exposure to high-ability peers without a scholarship signal has no detectable effect. These results suggest that students respond more strongly to observable signals of academic standing than to peers’ underlying academic preparation. Taken together, our findings indicate that the sources of academic influence evolve over time.

Evaluations of microenterprise credit typically measure effects only on borrowing firms. But what about their customers? If microenterprises sell relatively undifferentiated goods and services, as is often hypothesized, credit may simply reallocate sales across firms and create little consumer benefit. In a randomized controlled trial in Chile, large loans increased treated firms’ profits by USD 292 per month, a 13.4% increase. Customer survey data indicate even larger benefits for customers: a gain of USD 494 per month in consumer surplus. Furthermore, using a sample of more than 125,000 non-treated firms operating in the same markets, we find little evidence of business stealing. The welfare gains from credit expansion thus extend well beyond the borrowers themselves.

There is substantial heterogeneity in economic, educational, and health outcomes among American Indians, shaped by factors such as geographic location (urban vs. rural), resource endowments, and historical experiences with federal policies. Nonetheless, there is clear evidence that historical policies, including forced relocation, boarding schools, and assimilation efforts, have had long-lasting negative effects on human capital development and intergenerational mobility in these populations. Recent decades have seen improvements in some areas, particularly where tribes have exercised greater self-governance and implemented innovative economic development strategies. This paper emphasizes that a “one-size-fits-all” approach is inadequate for analyzing the sources and potential remediation of disparities across various outcomes between Native populations and descendants of later arrivals. A unique challenge is that the measurement and analysis of American Indian outcomes are complicated by issues of racial and tribal identification, data limitations, and changing definitions. These challenges can obscure true trends and make it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of policies or programs, underscoring the need for more precise and disaggregated data. This essay comments on the need for caution and clarity in the use and analysis of data for this population in both historical and contemporary settings.

Political representation is systematically aligned with economically consequential differences in individual behavior: homeowners who are most deeply incorporated into electoral institutions are systematically more effective at accumulating housing wealth. Using a nationwide voter-property dataset, we find that realized housing appreciation increases monotonically with electoral participation, robust to controls for geography, partisanship, demographics, wealth proxies, and income. Politically engaged homeowners actively generate value by purchasing undervalued properties, investing more in improvements, and selling at a premium, indicating individual-level differences rather than passive market exposure. An original survey shows that these homeowners also systematically differ in personality traits, pointing to deeper individual differences associated with both political engagement and housing-market performance.

Using Facebook friendship data, we study how three aspects of social capital shape innovative activity. We find that the most important aspect of social capital in explaining innovation is Economic Connectedness (EC)--the share of high-income friendships. One standard deviation greater EC is associated with 97% more patents per capita among patenting ZIP Codes and 45% more breakthrough patents per capita among ZIP Codes with breakthrough patents. Reverse-causality tests, a within-inventor relocation design, and a quasi-experiment using fracking-driven economic shocks to non-local friends support a causal interpretation. Mechanism tests provide evidence consistent with a financing channel.

Probabilistic expectation questions are often used to measure subjective uncertainty, but respondents frequently assign all probability to one outcome. We show that this bunching is partly a survey artifact rather than genuine certainty. In the (online) ECB Consumer Expectations Survey and the (in person) Spanish Survey of Household Finances, bunching is higher among less financially literate respondents and increases with panel tenure. Two survey-design changes provide stronger evidence: enforcing neutral interviewer protocols reduces bunching by about 15 percentage points, and a later questionnaire redesign reduces it by a further 18 percentage points. Interviewer-level variation also falls after standardization. These findings imply that degenerate responses in probabilistic expectations can reflect task burden and survey administration, causing standard measures to overstate certainty and understate uncertainty.

Can foreign intervention redirect domestic mobilization toward the regime it seeks to weaken? We study the 2026 U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran, which occurred amid a nationwide anti-government uprising. Combining high-frequency geocoded data on protests with geocoded records of U.S.–Israeli strikes, we document a sharp reversal in political mobilization. Anti-government protest was widespread before the strikes and receded sharply through February amid domestic repression and an intensifying “foreign-agent” narrative. Following the strikes, pro-government rallies and protests against the United States and Israel spread across the country. Exploiting the precise location and staggered timing of counties’ first exposure to a U.S.–Israeli strike, we find little change in total protest activity but a sharp shift from anti-government to pro-government protest. Public statements by U.S. and Israeli leaders increasingly aligned themselves with the protest movement, while Iranian officials portrayed the unrest as foreign-backed. These patterns are consistent with strategic sovereignty: overt foreign intervention can make domestic opposition easier to portray as aligned with an external adversary, weakening its legitimacy and redirecting collective action toward defense of the state.

How do patent rights affect innovation and downstream production? Patent protection was introduced for plant biotechnology in the United States in 1985, and it affected crops differentially depending on their reproductive structures. Exploiting this unique feature of plant flower structure and a new dataset of crop-specific technology development, I find that the introduction of patent rights increased the development of novel plant varieties. Technology development was driven by a rapid increase in private sector research investment, was accompanied by positive spillover effects on innovation in certain non-biological agricultural technologies, and led to an increase in crop yields. Patent rights, however, may come with potentially significant costs to the consumers of technology and distortions to downstream production. Nevertheless, despite higher spending on seeds, US counties that were more exposed to the change in patent law because of their crop composition experienced an increase in agricultural land values and profits. Taken together, the results suggest that the prospect of patent protection spurred innovation and increased downstream productivity and profits.

This paper studies one of the largest spatial redevelopment efforts in the United States: HOPE VI public housing demolitions. Focusing on Chicago, we estimate a neighborhood choice model combining administrative records tracking displaced public-housing residents with Census Bureau data capturing citywide sorting and prices. Demolitions generate large welfare losses driven by displacement costs, partially offset by housing vouchers. Demolitions also raise housing prices and reshape neighborhood composition, with gains concentrated among higher-income homeowners. Counterfactuals show that more generous vouchers and counseling programs mitigate but do not eliminate displaced residents' losses, while expanded redevelopment yields larger citywide gains through general-equilibrium effects.

We study the aggregate and heterogeneous effects of a front-of-package labeling policy implemented in Chile. We find that consumers reduced their sugar and caloric intake by 9% and 6%, respectively. On the demand side, labels prompt consumers to substitute within categories rather than switching between categories. Within-category responses are more pronounced when labels provide new information. On the supply side, we observe bunching at regulatory thresholds, with substantial heterogeneity across categories, consistent with differing costs of product reformulation. We conclude that considering policy-response heterogeneity is key for effective policy design.

Gender-based harassment in public spaces affects women directly through victimization and indirectly through fear. We measure these dual effects in urban India, where harassment is widely regarded as pervasive. Surveying over 4,000 women recruited in public spaces in New Delhi and Bengaluru, we document that 65% of women in New Delhi and 29% in Bengaluru experienced harassment in public spaces in the past year. Past-year prevalence of groping, stalking, or sexual assault is 41% in New Delhi and 14% in Bengaluru. Both frequent, less severe forms of harassment and rarer, more severe forms generate anxiety among women; for example, 46% of women in New Delhi and 25% in Bengaluru report feeling extremely anxious about sexual assault when in public spaces. Not all of the indirect effects track the across-city variation in experienced harassment: in both cities, roughly 70\% of women report that fear of harassment affects whether they work. Finally, on measurement, we show that measured prevalence is more sensitive to questionnaire design where harassment is less common and victims have fewer and less recent incidents to recall.

We study the first statewide SNAP restrictions on sweetened beverages and candy. Restricted spending falls 11 percent; calories and sugar fall 5–8 percent. Substitution is asymmetric: eligible fruit drinks partly offset soda declines, while candy restrictions reduce purchases of eligible snacks. Retailers barely change shelf prices. Losing SNAP’s sales-tax exemption raises tax-inclusive prices only 1.9 percent. Spending declines are larger at retailers with greater SNAP use and remain large online, where checkout stigma is less salient. Nationwide adoption would impose 13 percent of the out-of-pocket burden of an equivalent excise tax, while welfare gains reach roughly $1.1 billion annually.

Children from low-income families face barriers outside the classroom that impede learning and limit opportunities for economic mobility. We study Communities In Schools (CIS), a program that places coordinators in high-poverty schools to connect struggling students with personalized support. Coordinators match students to resources that address academic, behavioral, and basic needs—such as tutoring, mental health counseling, and housing stabilization. CIS is the largest program of its kind in the U.S., reaching 2 million students annually. Using the staggered rollout of CIS, we find that the program boosts test scores for struggling students. These gains persist, raising high school completion and adult earnings. Improvements in test scores explain only about half of CIS's impact on high school graduation; the remainder reflects progress on non-cognitive outcomes such as attendance and behavior. Consistent with CIS's emphasis on personalization, coordinators tailor services to distinct student needs, yet students with different needs experience comparable long-run gains. Placing a trusted adult in schools, backed by a network of programs and services, may offer a scalable way to improve economic mobility.

We study optimal commodity taxation when consumers are rationally inattentive and the planner internalizes their attention costs. In our setting, consumers may underreact to taxes, may allocate attention unevenly across goods, and may display sparse behavior or mental accounting. Our main result is that this need not change tax design: in a benchmark, optimal taxes satisfy the same sufficient-statistics formulas as in classical public finance, regardless of the extent and endogeneity of inattention. Away from this benchmark, we offer a dual rationale for state-dependent taxes and a new lens on tax salience; but we still find no room for the adjustments emphasized in recent work on behavioral public finance.

We measure the convenience yield on dollar safe assets over the last 5 years to answer this question. We find that within the set of U.S. dollar assets, safe asset convenience yields are about the same in 2025 as they were in 2019, and these levels are expected to persist for the next decade. Across the globe, the richness of U.S. dollar safe assets, particularly Treasurys, compared to the safe assets of other currencies have fallen considerably. There is also evidence that the U.S. dollar repo is currently the highest convenience dollar safe asset. In short, our answer is, no for domestic liquidity purposes, and yes for global liquidity purposes.

In the late nineteenth century, Americans feared that crowded immigrant neighborhoods were spreading disease through industrial cities. We study this claim using newly constructed town-level panel data from Massachusetts, 1860 to 1915, a setting uniquely suited to this exercise because its early vital registration system allows consistent measurement of mortality before national registration became widespread. Using a shift-share instrumental variable strategy based on historical settlement patterns, we estimate the effect of local exposure to immigration on mortality. The relevant question is not whether immigrant families themselves experienced higher mortality, but whether immigration altered the local disease environment more broadly. We find that increases in the foreign-born share significantly raised infant and child mortality, with the infant effect falling disproportionately on the post-neonatal period. Mechanical changes in the composition of births by parent nativity account for only a portion of the estimated effect, implying that the results are not driven primarily by higher mortality among immigrant births. Instead, the evidence is consistent with increased exposure to immigrants, communicable disease, and spillovers to children of native-born parents. These findings highlight immigration as one factor shaping the mortality transition in crowded high-mortality environments.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming measurement in economics. AI models convert unstructured data, such as text and images, into structured variables at low cost, making previously prohibitive measurement feasible at scale. This shifts the bottleneck from finding any scalable measure of a phenomenon to choosing among many plausible ones, which may support different empirical conclusions. This review provides guidance for navigating that shift. We describe three stages at which AI enters the measurement pipeline—discovery, construct definition, and observation—and what each demands of researchers. We argue that credible inference with AI-generated variables requires appropriately designed validation: anchoring measurement to explicit criteria, rather than informal claims that a proxy is reasonable. We then examine how validation samples support valid inference even when AI predictions are arbitrarily biased, and what can be done when a random validation sample is unavailable.

The US federal government owns and administers 472,892,659 acres or 21% of the land area of the lower 48 states, the country’s largest landowner. The resource is held and managed as a collective resource, the Federal Lands, through political and bureaucratic interpretation of the Multiple Use principle and generally, the biological aim of maximum sustained-yield. By contrast, access, exchange, and investment for most other US natural resources are through private property rights and markets. Despite the magnitude of the resource, economists have devoted relatively limited attention to the economic and welfare impact. The objective is to suggest economic implications and to encourage additional economic analyses. The discussion summarizes federal lands privatization through 1891, when withholding of federal lands began. The literature reveals no demonstratable market failure or increased resource scarcity from private exploitation between 1870 and 1957 when most lands were withheld. Because land was nonmobile and observable private property rights could have been assigned and any externalities addressed via Pigouvian restrictions or Coasean exchange. Federal ownership was not obviously required. Progressive Era reformers, driven by concerns of impending resource depletion, called for scientific, sustained-yield management by government officials. The institutional change is economically important. As outlined by Dixit and others, private rights holders have high powered incentives for efficient resource use that are lacking in decision making by agency officials who do not hold exchangeable property rights and do not directly bear the economic costs and benefits of their actions. Consequential public goods delivery could be an offset, but these are not measured for tradeoff calculations. Following Krueger, a rent-seeking framework is presented for comparing outcomes with economic property rights and political management. The analysis suggests that a.) federal lands will have lower production value than comparable private, all else equal; (b). federal lands management will be less responsive to shifts in economic costs and benefits. Public goods may be provided for high amenity, recreation, and ecological areas, but the dominant Multiple Use management principle provides no objective criteria for allocation or for periodic outcome assessment and adjustment. A literature review and data for contemporary federal forests, range, and oil and gas lands are provided.

We use data on 44,000 twin pairs observed as adolescents in the 2000 Census, linked to their earnings 20 years later, to study the heritability of labor market outcomes. We extend the Classical Twins Design (CTD), which identifies heritability from contrasts between monozygotic and dizygotic twins, to settings where an analyst does not observe zygosity but can measure outcomes for same-sex and opposite-sex twins. We also allow for the presence of a family- and sex-specific component affecting same-sex siblings but only partly shared by opposite-sex siblings. Our extended model identifies heritability from the difference-in-differences of same-sex vs. opposite-sex twins vs. siblings. The estimates indicate strong heritability (h² approximately 0.36) of log earnings. Using an AKM (Abowd et al., 1999) decomposition that separates the person-specific component of earnings from employer-specific pay premiums, we find that both components are heritable. The heritability of employer pay premiums, however, is mainly driven by same-sex twins who work at the same firm, suggesting that social interactions may lead to an over-estimate of the genetic component in earnings. Excluding siblings who work together leads to estimates of the heritability of log earnings that are 15% lower. Similar biases may be present in CTD-based estimates of heritability for other social outcomes like education.

We characterize optimal labor and capital income taxation in a task-based model of automation. Workers and machines are perfect substitutes in automatable tasks, which run from the bottom of the skill distribution up to a threshold. Workers supply labor on the extensive margin. Capitalists supply machines at a finite elasticity. In this general-equilibrium automation economy, optimal tax formulas take canonical partial-equilibrium forms. Yet automation substantially changes optimal tax rates because wages and capital returns are endogenous. We calibrate the model to the US wage distribution and automation exposure. In equilibrium, the middle class is the most automated, with machine intensity peaking around the 40th wage percentile. Relative to a no-automation benchmark, the optimal labor tax schedule is more progressive: a larger EITC subsidy at the bottom, lower taxes in the middle, and higher taxes at the top. The optimal capital tax is sizable but unaffected by automation.

We examine how information affects the choice between Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) and Old-Age Insurance (OAI) benefits for people between 62 and full retirement age. We find that receiving an initial Social Security statement, which provides recipients with personalized estimated benefit amounts available from DI and OAI, increases the probability of applying for both programs among those with a work-limiting health condition or a low work ability index, and this response is concentrated among people who are further from full retirement age. The increase in DI applications is split between applications for DI only and applications for both programs.

We study the employment effects of California’s $20 fast-food minimum wage. Evaluating this policy poses two challenges in commonly used aggregate datasets: coverage is based on 60-establishment chain-size threshold that cannot be identified; and there is measurement error in the industry codes used to identify fast-food restaurants. We address these challenges using establishment-level data. We find evidence of negative employment effects, but they are concentrated among small chains, among which the policy also slowed entry and increased exit. Thus, the primary effect of the fast-food minimum wage was to disadvantage small chains, albeit with modest overall employment effects thus far.

This paper provides the first causal evidence that gender affects the information an individual receives about careers. We conduct a large-scale field experiment in which real college students seek career information from 10,000 working professionals. We randomize whether a professional receives a message from a male or a female student. When students ask broadly for information about a career, female students receive substantially more information on work/life balance than male students. This gender difference persists when students specifically ask about work/life balance. A survey of professionals suggests non-altruistic motives for discussing work/life balance with women. Combining findings from the field experiment and results from an information intervention, we conclude that gender gaps in information received about work/life balance are consequential for gender gaps in career intentions.

While recent research has provided evidence that the Medicaid expansions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) reduced mortality, there is no evidence on the effect of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) net of the Medicaid expansions on mortality. This is an important gap in knowledge because the ACA significantly increased health insurance coverage in non-expansion states. In this article, we exploit the large increase in health insurance coverage brought forth by the ACA to examine the effect of the ACA and Medicaid expansions on mortality. Unlike prior studies that relied solely on geographic variation in Medicaid expansions to estimate the net effect of the expansion, we use a novel empirical approach that allows us to investigate the effect of the ACA net of Medicaid expansion on mortality, the incremental effect of the Medicaid expansion, and the overall effect of the ACA including Medicaid expansion. We use longitudinal data from the NHIS Linked Mortality Files (LMF) and a nationally representative sample of 40 to 58-year-olds combined with a difference-in-differences and a difference-in-differences-in-differences research design to obtain estimates of the effect of the ACA on mortality. We find no evidence that the Medicaid expansions had a beneficial effect on mortality but do find that the ACA net of Medicaid expansion reduced mortality.

Motivated by William Julius Wilson’s account of concentrated disadvantage, we examine a local poverty-trap interpretation of low entrepreneurship in Black neighborhoods. Using registration data from 38 states, we document a long-standing Black neighborhood startup deficit. Amid shocks that raised expectations of greater economic activity, the deficit reverses sharply in 2020, particularly where pre-existing deficits were larger. While the overall surplus attenuates, relative entrepreneurship remains elevated in high-deficit Black neighborhoods, and neighborhood-oriented entrepreneurship also remains elevated through 2024. Together, these patterns are consistent with a partially sustained shift toward a higher-activity equilibrium.

We document a strong negative serial correlation between stock market returns in i) the second month of a quarter and ii) the first month of the subsequent quarter. This pattern arises as investors fail to fully recognize the predictably repetitive aggregate earnings “news” conveyed by the late earnings announcements in the second month of a quarter. The neglected correlation leads to overreaction, which is in turn corrected when earnings of a new quarter are announced. Consistent with this hypothesis, returns in the second month of a quarter positively correlate with those of the preceding month, and the return pattern amplifies when earnings announced in these two months are more similar. Survey data and industry-level returns lend further support to this mechanism. These results provide evidence of correlation neglect even among sophisticated, financially incentivized decision-makers, underscoring its importance as a behavioral phenomenon.

Rapid economic growth creates large differences in lifetime incomes across generations. This paper examines the intergenerational redistribution generated by subsidized access to appreciating public assets in rapidly growing economies. We show that providing incumbent generations with subsidized access to these assets before future growth is fully capitalized into market values gives them an early claim on subsequent economic growth, thereby redistributing resources from future to incumbent generations. In the context of housing privatization, subsequent capital gains on privatized housing enable homeowners to trade up, further amplifying housing demand, house prices, and intergenerational redistribution. We evaluate the early ownership and capital gains channels of asset-based redistribution in a quantitative equilibrium model calibrated to China's housing privatization. Relative to more standard pension-based redistribution, we show that asset-based redistribution delivers higher welfare for future cohorts while substantially reducing long-run fiscal burdens once economic growth unexpectedly slows.

A large literature posits a central role for human capital in determining macroeconomic output, while another documents substantial private returns to educational investment. However, whether private gains translate into aggregate gains remains uncertain, as signaling, displacement, or general-equilibrium adjustment may drive a wedge between private and aggregate returns. This paper bridges these literatures with causal evidence that state-level school finance reforms (SFRs) increase macroeconomic output. First, I combine design-based micro estimates of SFR effects on private earnings with a cohort replacement framework to simulate state-level earnings per worker. The simulation predicts little change for 10 to 15 years, then gradual gains as treated cohorts enter the labor force, reaching 7.8 percent after 60 years. Next, I test this prediction using the staggered implementation of SFRs across U.S. states. In an event-study framework, state-level earnings per worker track the predicted path, remaining flat through about 15 years before rising roughly 4.7 percent above counterfactual levels after 30 years — consistent with private earnings gains aggregating to the broader economy. Finally, I show that these effects extend to broader economic output, with GDP per capita declining modestly initially before rising to more than 5 percent above its counterfactual path after 30 years.

We study whether pro-integrity social norms can substitute for formal enforcement in deterring misconduct by public officials. Singapore, widely regarded as one of the world’s least corrupt countries, provides a sharp setting to examine whether decades of successful anti-corruption enforcement can produce self-sustaining norms. Using universe-level housing transactions, we identify informed home purchases by civil servants around expansions of the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system. Relative to a matched uninformed control, civil servants disproportionately purchase homes near planned—but not yet publicly announced—stations, with the effect concentrated one to two years before public announcements. The behavior is concentrated among mid-level officials and agencies connected to rail planning, generates meaningful private gains, and also appears among relatives, consistent with information leakage. Stronger formal enforcement substantially reduces both direct and indirect misconduct. We combine the transaction evidence with independent survey measures of perceived corruption, public trust, and pro-integrity norms and develop a dynamic model in which norms are persistent but fragile, enforcement both directly deters misconduct and indirectly sustains norms, and policymakers learn about the persistence of norms from noisy integrity signals. Observed pre-tightening misconduct, deterioration in survey-based integrity measures, and the subsequent decline in misconduct following stronger enforcement are more consistent with policymakers learning that norms have limited persistence than with a response to transitory noise. The findings suggest that even in high-integrity societies, social norms may not be sufficiently self-sustaining to maintain a low-corruption equilibrium without continued formal enforcement.

Spectrum repacking auctions can restore feasibility along two margins: retiring a station via buyout or relaxing a pairwise engineering restriction. I represent stations as vertices in a network and interference restrictions as edges between them, and so station buyouts delete vertices and engineering waivers relax edges. This paper shows that buying out any one station can reduce the number of channels needed, even though relaxing any single interference restriction cannot. The smallest feasible number of channels is $k$ . For every $k\geq4$, I show that there is a network in which removing any station saves one channel, while relaxing any single pairwise restriction does not. This main result follows directly from Dirac’s half-century-old conjecture on vertex-critical graphs, whose chromatic number falls after any vertex is removed. By constructing the missing counterexample at $k=4$ and combining it with earlier results for $k\geq5$, I show that at every $k\geq4$, some $k$-vertex-critical graph has no critical edge, resolving Dirac's conjecture. Market designers auditing feasibility link-by-link systematically can mistake combinatorial complementarity for remedy failure, overlooking station buyouts that unlock the clearing target.

As governments increasingly turn to social innovation to address complex societal and environmental challenges, the lack of robust, scalable measurement frameworks continues to limit the effectiveness of relevant policies. Without such tools, it remains difficult to assess regional capacities, evaluate outcomes, and design targeted interventions that foster societal resilience and adaptability. This paper introduces a novel index of regional social innovation capacity, which is defined as a region's ability to develop, implement, and sustain social innovations. Drawing conceptually from the technological innovation literature, the index integrates multidimensional inputs for social innovation capacity using publicly available data and has been externally validated through an empirical analysis of social innovation activities published on German company websites. By employing regional planning areas as the unit of analysis, our framework enables cross-regional comparison while preserving local specificity. It also advances the measurability, visibility, and accountability of social innovation, offering policymakers an evidence-based tool for strategic resource allocation. From an academic perspective, the index bridges fragmented approaches across disciplines and contributes to a more coherent, comparative, policy-relevant social innovation research agenda.

Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP) offers a compelling framework for addressing societal challenges. However, its implementation requires a deeper understanding of the behavioural and relational dynamics among local actors because these dynamics can enable or hinder sustainable and inclusive policy outcomes. Drawing on an embedded case study of the implementation of residential electric vehicle charging infrastructure in England, we unveil how the interplay between policy ambiguities and emergent conflicts conditions the local pathways of TIP implementation. We show that local actors respond to ambiguities of role, means, and resourcing, and that these responses can shape three conflicts (purpose incongruence, commons contestation, and financial fragility) which evolve over time. Building on these insights, we develop a model of local TIP implementation that explains how implementing actors respond to ambiguities and how these responses shape conflicts. Overall, our analysis contributes to understanding the intertemporal and distributive challenges facing TIP implementation.

This paper examines how the labor market effects of automation and digital technologies vary across their technology life cycles. Using data for 158 European regions from 1995 to 2017, we study the phase-specific impacts of robots, information and communication technologies (ICT), and software and databases (SDB) on employment and wages. We identify distinct technology life cycles and their early and mature adoption phases by applying a structural break methodology to investment dynamics. To address endogeneity in regional exposure, we employ a shift-share instrumental-variable strategy that leverages US investment patterns interacted with pre-determined regional industrial structures. We find that labor market effects differ systematically across both technologies and life-cycle phases. Early adoption is skill-biased for intangible digital technologies: exposure to SDB during early diffusion is associated with declining employment and rising wages. In contrast, early ICT adoption is characterized by employment expansion concentrated among lower-paid workers, consistent with productivity-driven demand growth, while robots exhibit largely skill-neutral effects in early diffusion. For tangible technologies, displacement effects emerge in mature adoption phases. Across technologies, labor market adjustment operates mainly through the services sector, even when adoption occurs in manufacturing (robots). Our findings demonstrate that aggregate estimates of ICT and robots often mask opposing life cycle phase- and technology-specific dynamics.

The deepening socio-environmental polycrisis has stimulated calls to rethink industrial modernity: the currently dominant societal assumptions about the natural environment, science and technology. However, the genesis and long-term co-evolution of these deep macro-level assumptions has rarely gained systematic attention in innovation studies. This is an important oversight given that the historical legacy of industrial modernity continues to shape the policy framing of current sustainability challenges as well as the design of appropriate interventions. In this paper we seek to develop a conceptual vocabulary for theorizing the historical evolution of industrial modernity. Combining the Deep Transitions framework from sustainability transitions studies with insights on long-term industrialization-related trends from various fields, we 1) present a systematically validated inventory of 38 constituent ideas, institutions and practices of industrial modernity; 2) map their emergence over the past 250 years; 3) identify 10 recurrent controversial outcomes generated by the interactions of these traits; 4) distinguish between three phases in the long-term evolution of industrial modernity. We conclude with a research agenda for studying the historical evolution, current impacts and policy implications of industrial modernity.

Expectations propel the evolution of emerging technologies, yet existing research generally assumes that expectations are gradually displaced by concrete outcomes as technologies mature and become widely accepted. We revisit this assumption by examining how technology adopters' temporal framings of technology performance, their expressions of concrete outcomes of technology adoption, and the broader technology discourse reflected in trade-press coverage relate to one another over time. We illuminate these patterns by tracing 21 years (2002−2022) of radio-frequency identification (RFID) adoption and analysing adopters' statements in 407 case stories published in The RFID Journal, coupled with a longitudinal corpus of trade-press coverage from the same period. Manual coding of adopters' expressions of concrete realised benefits and challenges in the case stories is combined with a purpose-built dictionary that detects five temporal positions in adopters' framings of RFID performance. We find that associations between concrete outcomes and temporal framings are selective and stage-dependent. Concrete outcomes do not simply replace expectations, instead, they become associated with specific temporal framings over time. We also find that adopters' temporal framings are associated with trade-press coverage in stage-specific ways that change over time, often amplifying but also sometimes tempering broader attention to RFID. We contribute to research on technology framing and expectations dynamics by foregrounding adopters as co-constructors of technology discourse, challenging the displacement assumption with a stage-sensitive explanation of expectation–outcome dynamics, and introducing a replicable, dictionary-based approach for large-scale analysis of temporal framings in technology narratives.

Artificial intelligence and other general-purpose digital technologies often diffuse unevenly: large firms adopt early, while smaller firms delay adoption, contract, or abandon the active adoption option. This paper develops a survival-constrained theory of technology adoption in which firms choose when to adopt an irreversible technology while financing operations under uncertain implementation costs. Abandonment/exit is endogenous: firms leave the active adoption race when the value of preserving the adoption option falls below the passive legacy fallback (the value of abandoning the active adoption option, normalized to zero). The key object is an adoption survival frontier, a boundary in financing-cost–implementation-uncertainty space separating environments in which followers survive long enough to adopt from environments in which they abandon the active adoption option first. The Cournot block disciplines the price-pass-through component of follower payoff erosion; additional non-price appropriability losses, captured by a reduced-form term χ A (data accumulation, platform lock-in, switching frictions, and reduced access to post-adoption rents), remain reduced-form. Numerical characterization of the corrected nonhomogeneous stopping problem shows that a leader-induced regime shift moves the survival frontier inward and raises the risk that followers abandon the active adoption option before adoption. A welfare decomposition clarifies when this selection is efficient and when it reflects an accounting externality: a leader-induced payoff shift that the follower’s private stopping problem does not represent before the regime shift. We do not solve a dynamic adoption-timing game. Public EU aggregate data show that large-minus-small AI adoption gaps are measurable, but also illustrate that aggregate cross-country regressions are confounded by development gradients and cannot identify the firm-level survival-to-adoption channel; we treat this as a measurement-feasibility map for future linked-microdata tests rather than as a test of the mechanism. The paper contributes a computational theory of adoption survival and a transparent measurement-feasibility map.

Abstract Research Summary We examine the effects of category erraticism, that is, having moved across socio‐cognitively distant industry categories over time, on status mobility. We argue that it is not the breadth of the categories that a firm spans or the overall distance among those categories, but whether its movement across categories forms a coherent or incoherent trajectory, that hinders upward status mobility by creating commitment and capability concerns among external audiences. We further argue that these concerns are more problematic for higher status firms and more experienced firms because they are subjected to stricter expectations of trajectory coherence. Using a comprehensive longitudinal sample of 1413 venture capital firms (VCs) in the U.S. VC industry from 1980 to 2012, we find that category erraticism reduces upward status mobility. This effect is partly mediated by the extent to which external audiences are concerned about the commitment and capability of the VCs, and is stronger for higher‐status and more experienced VCs. Managerial Summary This study shows that how venture capital firms (VCs) move across industries over time shapes their status position in the VC industry. VCs that move across distant sectors in ways that appear incoherent, often described in the industry as thesis drift, strategy drift, or tourist VC behavior, raise concerns about their long‐term commitment and ability to add value to the firms in which they invest. These concerns make it harder for such firms to form syndication relationships with high‐status partners, limiting their ability to improve their status position. In contrast, VCs that expand across industries in a more consistent way, where moves build on prior experience and reflect a clear investment thesis, are more likely to be viewed as committed and capable, which facilitates upward status mobility. Using three decades of data on U.S. VC investments, we find that the downsides of erratic investment paths are especially pronounced for higher‐status and more experienced VCs, which are held to stronger expectations of strategic coherence over time.

Abstract Research Summary Prior research documents that firms often collaborate with advocacy groups to mitigate stakeholder contention. Integrating stakeholder theory into a performance model of collaborative innovation, we propose an overlooked explanation for such collaborations: to enhance the adoption of firms' innovations. We argue that advocacy groups influence the adoption of innovations through a distinct, role‐based legitimacy mechanism. Because advocacy groups are expected to scrutinize firms' conduct, their willingness to collaborate provides a credible signal that a firm's innovation is socially appropriate. These signals become particularly valuable when firms have previously faced media criticism for socially irresponsible products or services and in industries characterized by high variation in corporate social performance. Using a unique dataset on firms' innovation collaborations in Germany, we find support for our conjectures. Managerial Summary Research indicates that firms collaborate with advocacy groups to avoid boycotts or protests. We introduce a largely overlooked additional rationale for such collaborations: to enhance the adoption of a firm's innovations. We suggest that advocacy groups can lend legitimacy to innovations and argue that firms benefit most from such collaborations when their products and services received bad press in the past and when there is considerable variation in corporate social performance across firms in the industry. Based on unique data on innovation collaborations between firms and advocacy groups, we find that these conditions matter in determining when firms can significantly benefit from involving advocacy groups in their innovation projects.

Abstract Research Summary This study examines how divisionalized firm structures shape the gender gap in internal chief executive officer (CEO) promotion. We argue that divisionalized firms may narrow the gender gap in CEO succession by generating more individually attributable performance information about senior managers. In contrast to firms in which candidates' contributions are difficult to isolate, divisionalized firms create profit‐and‐loss (P&L) accountability that makes managerial performance more visible and comparable. Using longitudinal data on over 616,000 managers in 49,135 US firms, we find that women are more likely to be promoted to CEO in divisionalized firms. We also find that the gender gap is smaller among managers with prior P&L‐accountable experience. Among managers in divisionalized firms, stronger unit performance relative to within‐firm peers is more positively associated with promotion to CEO for women than for men. The results highlight organizational structure as a potential source of variation in gender inequality in executive advancement. Managerial Summary Why do so few women become CEOs? Part of the answer lies in how firms are organized. When a company is structured into divisions with their own profit‐and‐loss responsibility, the results of the managers who lead those units are easier to observe, compare, and credit to the individual. This leaves less room for subjective judgments through which gender bias often enters promotion decisions. In data on more than 600,000 managers at roughly 49,000 US firms, we find that women are more likely to be promoted to CEO in divisionalized firms. The pattern is strongest for women who have led a business unit, and strong unit results count for more in women's promotion prospects. For boards seeking greater gender equity in CEO succession, structures and evaluation systems that give senior leaders clear, comparable performance records may matter as much as diversity initiatives.