Economics

This chapter examines the economics of climate innovation and its role in the clean technology transition. It outlines the incentives, market failures, and policy levers that shape the development and diffusion of clean technologies; traces global patterns in technology development and deployment; and highlights frontier challenges and open questions related to climate adaptation, critical mineral supply chains, artificial intelligence, and geopolitics. The analysis explores the role of effective climate policy, stressing the relevance of coordinated approaches that match instruments to technology maturity and local context.

Human capital is central to efforts to promote growth, convergence, and the elimination of poverty. Drawing on the seminal macroeconomic frameworks by Nelson-Phelps, Lucas and subsequent developments, alongside macro and microeconomic evidence, we examine the role of human capital in driving innovation and growth. We highlight how different types of human capital, characterized by education level, matter in different stages of development. Despite documented increases in years of schooling, the world’s poorest regions still see stagnating outcomes in learning and education quality, potentially creating poverty traps where investments in neither physical nor human capital materialize. We di..

The study examines the quasi-natural experiments provided by the staggered introduction of open drivers in the supply chains for routers. It is rare to observe components become open and measure whether openness generates a statistical impact on more products and innovative products. This study collects novel data on all routers and subcomponents introduced between 2000 and 2018, characterizing each firm's position in a supply chain as either an upstream component provider or a downstream router assembler. Following prior literature, openness influences a firm's ability to negotiate with current and potential partners, which is labeled as autonomy. Evidence suggests that openness enhances su..

We study how production networks shape the severity of Sudden Stops. We build a small open economy model with collateral constraints and input–output linkages, derive a sufficient statistic that maps network structure into the amplification of tradable shocks, and show that a planner optimally introduces sectoral wedges to reduce amplification. Using OECD input–output data and Sudden Stop episodes, we document systematic network differences between emerging and advanced economies and show they predict crisis severity. A calibrated three-sector DSGE model disciplined by these differences reveals that endowing an advanced economy with an emerging-market production network moves most of the..

We examine women's household power in low- and middle-income countries, synthesizing theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence on its measurement, determinants, and consequences. We define women's household power as their influence over household choices, distinguishing it from broader empowerment concepts. We review economic models, including unitary, collective, and bargaining frameworks, and map these to empirical approaches. We then discuss measurement methods such as structural estimation of consumption allocation, survey measures, and laboratory experiments. On the determinants of women's power, we find that some approaches, such as transfers targeted to women, show mixed results, ..

We leverage the introduction of the first antibiotic therapies in 1937 to examine the long-run effects of early-childhood pneumonia on adult educational attainment, employment, income, and work-related disability. Using census data, we document large average improvements across all outcomes, alongside substantial heterogeneity by gender and race. Among women, health gains led to changes in marriage and fertility that partially offset their labor market improvements. Among Black Americans, we uncover a pronounced gradient linked to systemic racial discrimination in the pre–Civil Rights era: individuals born in more discriminatory Jim Crow states realized much smaller gains than those born i..

We document six facts about the structure and dynamics of the LLM market using API usage data from OpenRouter and Microsoft Azure. First, we show rapid growth in the number of models, creators, and inference providers, driven by open-source entrants. Second, we show price declines and persistent price heterogeneity across and within intelligence tiers, with open-source models being 90% cheaper than comparable closed-source models of the same intelligence. Third, we document market dynamism, with frequent turnover among leading models and creators. Fourth, we present evidence of horizontal and vertical differentiation, with no single model dominating across use cases, and demand for intellige..

The Heterogeneous-Agent New Keynesian literature has revisited the transmission of monetary and fiscal policy to consumption using models where heterogeneous households face idiosyncratic income risk and borrowing constraints. We show that the key lessons from this literature also apply to investment using a model where heterogeneous firms face idiosyncratic productivity risk and financial frictions: constrained firms’ investment depends on their free cash flow, generating indirect effects of monetary policy and implying that transfer payments stimulate investment demand. Quantitatively, the strength of these new mechanisms is governed by firms’ marginal propensities to invest (MPIs), si..

This paper presents evidence suggesting that delayed Social Security claiming by husbands – resulting in an actuarially enhanced benefit – attenuates the financial shock of widowhood for their wives. Under Social Security survivor benefit rules, primary earners (usually husbands) pass on the actuarial adjustments from delayed claiming to their surviving spouses. Using a staggered difference-in-differences approach, I find women whose husbands delayed claiming to full retirement age or later face a post-widowhood increase of 6.9 percentage points in the probability of falling below the 5th percentile of the pre-widowhood income distribution. This effect is almost 12 percent smaller for ea..

We measure benefits to households from Mumbai’s new Metro rail system. We estimate a commute mode choice model to value commute time savings in the short run and a housing choice model to value the improved commuting utility that households experience due to spatial sorting. Aggregate benefits from Metro rail are over 10 times higher when spatial sorting occurs. In the short run women, college-educated workers, and workers with above median incomes experience higher benefits than their opposites. In the long run, households with lower incomes and assets and less than college education benefit more than their wealthier counterparts.