This paper reviews the main motivations and arguments of my work on comparative development, colonialism and institutional change, which was often carried out jointly with James Robinson and Simon ...

Natality Data from the National Vital Statistics System of the National Center for Health Statistics provides demographic and health data for births occurring during the calendar year. The microdata ...

This chapter surveys new data sources employed in urban and regional economics in the past decade and the insights they have enabled. We first provide a primer on the data sources, including ...

We measure whether expert patients – those trained as physicians and nurses – have fewer emergency department visits and the reasons for these differences. Relative to similar patients physicians and ...

New York City became the first city in the United States to introduce a fee for vehicles entering its central business district (CBD). Using Google Maps Traffic Trends, we show that the policy ...

Extending the theoretical framework of Carnehl and Schneider (2025), we analyse how decision-makers leverage AI to improve precision within well-defined knowledge domains. We identify conditions under ...

The standard view of housing markets holds that the flexibility of local housing supply–shaped by factors like geography and regulation–strongly affects the response of house prices, house quantities ...

We generalize the seminal Gibbons-Ross-Shanken test to the empirically relevant case where the number of test assets far exceeds the number of observations. In such a setting, one needs to use a ...

We study capital regulation in a dynamic model for bank deposits. Capital regulation addresses banks’ incentive for excessive leverage that dilutes depositors, but preserves some dilution to reduce ...

There is growing recognition of the relative importance of anthropogenic emissions of methane as a contributor to global climate change. An important source of such emissions in some countries, ...

In this essay, I analyze the nationalization of large copper mines during Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile in the 1970s. This is one of the earliest cases “nationalization without ...

We draw on a recombinant view of innovation, where being in a new location and/or multiple locations leads to exposure to novel combinations of ideas that increase the creativity of top scientists.