Results

CEP discussion paper

Roads to development? Urbanization without growth in Zambia

This study explores the impacts of road improvements in a country characterized by "urbanization without growth". Our analysis reveals that, although road upgrades increase population growth, they do not significantly ad...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Organizational capacity and profit shifting

Good organizational capacity drives productivity and potential taxable profits, but may also enable multinationals (MNEs) to more efficiently re-allocate profits across tax jurisdictions, lowering actual taxable profits....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Highway traffic in Britain: the effect of road capacity changes

This paper examines the effects of road capacity expansion on traffic volumes, population, and employment in Great Britain between 2001 and 2020, using annual data for 218 Travel-to-Work Areas and an instrumental-variabl...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Regional Science:

Within-city roads and urban growth

In this paper we study the role of within-city roads layout in fostering city growth. Within-city roads networks have not been studied extensively in economics although they are essential to facilitate human interactions...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Using disasters to estimate the impact of uncertainty

Uncertainty rises in recessions and falls in booms. But what is the causal relationship? We construct cross-country panel data on stock market returns to proxy for first- and second-moment shocks and instrument these wit...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Unraveling firms: demand, productivity and markups heterogeneity

We develop a novel framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, quantity TFP and markups across firms while leaving the correlation between the three dimensions unrestricted. We accomplish thi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dissecting the sinews of power: international trade and the rise of Britain's fiscal-military state, 1689-1823

We evaluate the role of taxes on trade in the development of imperial Britain's fiscal-military state. Influential work, e.g., Brewer's (1989) Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of dome...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

The local labor market effects of modern manufacturing capital: evidence from France

Using an event study methodology and comprehensive micro data from the French manufacturing sector, we analyze the local labor market effects of investments in modern manufacturing capital, including modern automation te...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Operations Management:

Working from home and firm resilience to the Covid-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted firms' operations. To cope with the crisis, many firms have allowed their employees to work from home (WFH). We examine whether a firm's WFH capacity has increased its resilience durin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Organizational capacity and profit shifting

Good organizational capacity drives productivity and potential taxable profits but may also enable multinationals (MNEs) to more efficiently re-allocate profits across tax jurisdictions, lowering actual taxable profits. ...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Public goods institutions, human capital, and growth: evidence from German history

What are the origins and consequences of the state as a provider of public goods? We study public goods provision established through new laws in German cities during the 1500s. Cities that adopted the laws subsequently ...Read more...

External report

The impact of academies on educational outcomes - the Education Policy Institute

The expansion of the academies programme has been one of the biggest changes to the English education system in a generation. 3.4 million children are now taught in either a sponsored or a converter academy. Those childr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

State capacity and public goods: institutional change, human capital and growth in early modern Germany

What are the origins and consequences of the state as a provider of public goods? We study legal reforms that established mass public education and increased state capacity in German cities during the 1500s. These fundam...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Market size, competition, and the product mix of exporters

We build a theoretical model of multi-product firms that highlights how competition across market destinations affects both a firm's exported product range and product mix. We show how tougher competition in an export ma...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade integration, market size and industrialization: evidence from China's national trunk highway system

Large scale transport infrastructure investments connect both large metropolitan centers of production as well as small peripheral regions. Are the resulting trade cost reductions a force for the diffusion of industrial ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

R&D in Developing Countries: What Should Governments Do?

I consider the implications of recent research for R&D policy in developing countries. Typical new growth models, which assume free entry and no strategic behaviour by R&D producers, are less appropriate for policy guida...Read more...