In this paper, we investigate a neglected aspect of financial systems of many countries around the world: government ownership of banks. We assemble data which establish four findings. First, ...

Going to college has consistently conferred a large wage premium. We show that the relative premium received by lower-income Americans has halved since 1960. We decompose this steady rise in ...

This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, ...

Recent empirical evidence by Fieldhouse and Mertens (2024) points to a strong causal link between federal nondefense R&D funding and private-sector productivity growth, and large implied social ...

We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants and ...

This paper characterizes the transition dynamics of a continuous-time neoclassical production economy with capital accumulation in which households face idiosyncratic income risk and cannot commit to ...

Nearly a third of American children experience parental divorce before adulthood. To understand its consequences, we use linked tax and Census records for over 5 million children to examine how ...

This paper reviews the recent literature on measuring and boosting cognitive and noncognitive skills. The literature establishes that achievement tests do not adequately capture character ...

In this paper, I analyze detailed data on intergenerational transfers in 4 countries (China, India, Japan, and the United States) from the “Japan Household Panel Survey on Consumer Preferences and ...

What sparked humanity’s leap from stagnation to prosperity? What lies at the core of inequality among nations? Unified Growth Theory explores the evolution of societies over the entire course of human ...

We use high-resolution spatial data to build a novel global annual gridded GDP dataset at 1°, 0.5°, and 0.25° resolutions from 2012 onward. Our random forest model trained on local and national GDP ...

We examine how the well-being of those with few resources changed, amidst economic disruption and large, transitory government transfers. We find that in the years leading up to the pandemic and in ...