Economics

The monumental task of rebuilding postwar Ukraine requires early planning and identification of growth strategies. The earlier accession of Eastern European countries to the European Union and NATO offers a template that relies on massive foreign direct investment and public structural funds. This approach helps to raise incomes directly and can create a virtuous circle where capital deepening facilitates technological upgrades and repatriation of war refugees, which in turn stimulate more investment. We show theoretically that the government can refine this strategy by internalizing positive externalities from having a higher capital stock: Investment in physical capital relaxes borrowing c..

Despite substantial convergence in men’s and women’s economic roles, gender gaps in labor market outcomes persist across countries. This article provides a unified framework for understanding how gender norms shape economic behavior, distinguishing between internalized norms—preferences and beliefs tied to gender identity—and external norms arising from peer pressure and social coordination. We first document cross-country and within-country variation in gender attitudes, alongside gradual but uneven shifts toward more egalitarian views. We then review empirical evidence on the origins, persistence, and transmission of gender norms, and their effects on human capital accumulation, la..

We discuss the conditions under which global imbalances, such as China being a large foreign creditor and the United States being a large foreign debtor, might also generate power imbalances. We highlight possible theoretical channels and empirical measures that the future literature could investigate in a full treatment of this topic.

Benchmark models of structural transformation focus on the reallocation of employment across sectors while assuming that overall employment stays constant. We show that this assumption does not match facts for developing economies. We study a panel of 48 mostly developing economies over the period 1990--2018 and document a strong positive relationship between the share of the population employed in agriculture and the overall employment rate. That is, the early part of the development process is associated with a substantial decline in the total employment rate. Motivated by this finding, we extend a benchmark model of structural change featuring Stone-Geary preferences to allow for endogeno..

This review essay discusses the history, causes and consequences of financial crises. In recent years scholars have assembled new sources of data and utilized new empirical designs to analyze crises, shedding light on old questions and producing new insights. This essay highlights those new insights, and uses the historical record of crises in the United States to put those insights into perspective. I begin with a discussion of the defining characteristics of financial crises and their evolution, both in the U.S. and in the rest of the world. I then revisit the chronology of crises in the U.S. since 1870. Data on bank failure rates and large-bank equity losses suggest that some panics were ..

When do people identify with their class? Evidence from social psychology shows that individuals are more likely to identify with a group if they are similar to its members. We study early 20th century Britain and show that regional cultural heterogeneity combined with internal migration influenced class identity. We develop and validate a measure of class identity using naming decisions. Exploiting within-household variation, we show that migration patterns that increased the local share of culturally-distant workers reduced working class identification. Where migration increased the cultural distance of the working class, workers were less likely to join unions, voters were less likely to ..