Worker Preparedness Across the Marshallian Runs Survey Instruments and Early Evidence from the Copenhagen Life Panel -- by Andrew Caplin, Søren Leth-Petersen, Victoria Gregory, Ida Maria Hartmann, Eungik Lee, Johan Sæverud
Worker preparedness is a missing transmission channel in macroeconomics. Alfred Marshall’s taxonomy of short-, medium-, and long-run adjustment was developed to analyse how firms respond to shocks when different inputs can or cannot adjust. We extend this logic to workers by adding an element Marshall’s framework leaves implicit: anticipation. Preparedness refers to the buffers, search strategies, fallback plans, and retraining intentions individuals form before disruption occurs. These forward-looking margins shape both microeconomic outcomes and the effectiveness of macroeconomic policy. The registry-linked Copenhagen Life Panel (CLP) provides a data architecture for making preparednes..
NBER > Working PapersExporting, Wage Profiles, and Human Capital: Evidence from Brazil -- by Xiao Ma, Marc-Andreas Muendler, Alejandro Nakab
Export activity shapes workers’ experience-wage profiles. Using employer-employee and customs data for Brazilian manufacturing, we document that workers' experience wage profiles are steeper at exporters than at non-exporters and, among exporters, steeper at exporters shipping to high-income destinations. We develop and quantify a model featuring worker-firm wage bargaining, export-market entry by multi-worker firms, and human capital accumulation by workers to interpret the data. Human capital growth can explain one-half of the differences in wage profiles between exporters and non-exporters. We show that increased human capital per worker can account for one-half of the overall gains in ..
NBER > Working PapersWho Chooses and Who Benefits? The Design of Public School Choice Systems -- by Christopher Campos, Jesse Bruhn, Eric Chyn, Antonia Vazquez
Public school choice has evolved rapidly in the past two decades, as districts roll out new magnet, dual-language, and themed programs to broaden educational opportunity. We use newly collected national data to document that opt-in (voluntary) systems: (i) are the modal design; (ii) are harder to navigate; and (iii) have participation that is concentrated among more advantaged students. These facts suggest a striking inconsistency: districts have largely adopted centralized assignment algorithms to broaden access, but most rely on optional participation that fragments public education. We study the implications of this design choice in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest opt..
NBER > Working PapersAgglomeration, Segregation and Imperial Origins -- by Ester Faia, Edward L. Glaeser, Saverio Simonelli, Martina Viarengo
What explains the dramatic differences in earnings across locations? We employ an administrative employer-employee linked dataset from Italy that includes the country’s entire workforce to estimate firm-worker or location-worker effects. We also estimate differences in human capital accumulation across firms and cities. We find that the elasticity of the location premia to density is smaller than in other settings and that other locational characteristics, such as segregation in school or the workplace and inter-generational mobility, are more strongly correlated with earnings and earnings growth. Our place-based estimates are similar if we focus on movers who were forced to relocate after..
NBER > Working PapersWhat Would it Cost to End Extreme Poverty? -- by Roshni Sahoo, Joshua Blumenstock, Paul Niehaus, Leo Selker, Stefan Wager
We study poverty minimization via direct transfers, framing this as a statistical learning problem while retaining the information constraints faced by real-world programs. Using nationally representative household consumption surveys from 23 countries that together account for 50% of the world’s poor, we estimate that reducing the poverty rate to 1% (from a baseline of 12% at the time of last survey) would cost $170B nominal per year. This is 5.5 times the corresponding reduction in the aggregate poverty gap, but only 19% of the cost of universal basic income. Extrapolated globally, the results correspond to a cost of (approximately) ending extreme poverty of roughly 0.3% of global GDP.
NBER > Working PapersLearning and the Emergence of Nonlinearity in Financial Markets -- by Ian Dew-Becker, Stefano Giglio, Pooya Molavi
Financial markets (and more generally the real economy) display a wide range of important nonlinearities. This paper focuses on stock returns, which are skewed left – generating crashes – and whose volatility moves over time, is itself skewed, is strongly related to the level of prices, and displays long memory. This paper shows that such behavior is almost inevitable when prices are formed by investors acquiring information about the true, but latent, value of stocks. It studies a general model of filtering in which agents receive signals about the fundamental value of the stock market and dynamically update their beliefs (potentially with biases). When those beliefs are non-normal and ..
NBER > Working PapersElections and Political Investment -- by Patrick A. Testa
Elections select officeholders and policies, but they also signal to political actors where to invest their time and money. This paper presents a framework for understanding these effects, in which political investors (e.g., donors, activists) allocate resources where expected political fundamentals favor their party. Investors possess idiosyncratic local knowledge but also public information in the form of recent election results. These signals are complementary: where local knowledge is good, even the narrowest vote-share majorities can align beliefs and concentrate investment. I apply this framework to the changing political geography of the United States between 1940 and 1972, when urban..
NBER > Working PapersThe Cost of State-Building: Evidence from Germany -- by Leander Heldring
I examine the potential of pro-development state (capacity) building projects to be coopted for repression. I leverage the natural experiment created by the differential build-up of capacity between formerly Prussian and formerly non-Prussian parts of unified Germany, and the radical policy shifts instigated by the Nazi regime. Across a geographical discontinuity, and across different stops of the same train transport to the East, I find that Prussian municipalities were significantly more efficient at deporting Germany's Jews. They were also better at providing public goods and at collecting taxes. Just before the Nazis came to power, Prussian municipalities also provided public goods more ..
NBER > Working PapersHow Good is International Risk Sharing? Stepping Outside the Shadow of the Welfare Theorems -- by Mark A. Aguiar, Oleg Itskhoki, Dmitry Mukhin
We revisit whether global output is (Pareto) efficiently distributed across countries over time. The efficient allocation of goods across regions requires that the relative marginal utilities of consumption across countries comoves with the relative costs of the country-specific consumption bundles. Standard approaches to evaluating this property exploit the Welfare Theorems and equate the observed real exchange rate with the social relative costs of consumption. Given the large literature documenting the disconnect between exchange rates, relative prices faced by consumers in a given market, and relative quantities consumed, we develop a methodology that measures relative costs that is robu..
NBER > Working PapersUnderstanding the Employment Effects of Opportunity Zones -- by Matthew Freedman, Noah Arman Kouchekinia, David Neumark
The Opportunity Zone program was designed to encourage investment in distressed communities across the United States. Early research found no evidence of impacts of the program on employment, earnings, or poverty of zone residents, but some evidence of positive effects on employment among businesses in zones. Using the latest survey-based as well as administrative data, we adopt a longer-run and more comprehensive perspective on the labor market impacts of OZs. We find that OZ designation increases job creation among businesses within zones. However, a large share of the newly created jobs in zones is offset by declines in nearby low-income communities. While we detect gains in OZ resident e..
NBER > Working PapersIdentity and Ideology in the School Boardroom -- by Barbara Biasi, Minseon Park, John D. Singleton, Seth D. Zimmerman
School boards have statutory authority over most elementary and secondary education policies, but receive little attention compared to other actors in education systems. A fundamental challenge to understanding the importance of boards is the absence of data on the policy goals of board members—i.e., their ideologies—forcing researchers to conduct tests based on demographic and professional characteristics—i.e., identities—with which ideology is presumed to correlate. This paper uses new data on the viewpoints and policy actions of school board members, coupled with a regression discontinuity design that generates quasi-random variation in board composition, to establish two results...
NBER > Working PapersMultidimensional Sorting: Comparative Statics -- by Job Boerma, Andrea Ottolini, Aleh Tsyvinski
In sorting literature, comparative statics for multidimensional assignment models with general output functions and input distributions is an important open question. We provide a complete theory of comparative statics for technological change in general multidimensional assignment models. Our main result is that any technological change is uniquely decomposed into two distinct components. The first component (gradient) gives a characterization of changes in marginal earnings through a Poisson equation. The second component (divergence-free) gives a characterization of labor reallocation. For U.S. data, we quantify equilibrium responses in sorting and earnings with respect to cognitive skill..
NBER > Working PapersPatents to Products: Product Innovation and Firm Dynamics -- by David Argente, Salomé Baslandze, Douglas Hanley, Sara Moreira
We match patents to products using natural language methods applied to detailed product descriptions and patent texts in the consumer goods sector. While more than half of product innovations originate from non-patenting firms, patent filings are on average followed by subsequent product introductions. Yet this relationship weakens with firm size. Patents held by market leaders also yield revenue premiums beyond what can be explained by their own product introductions and are associated with stronger deterrence of competitors’ innovations. To interpret these findings, we develop a simple growth model in which larger firms have stronger incentives to engage in strategic patenting—filing f..
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