Economic-Growth

Daria Finocchiaro · Philippe Weil

Research Question. Finocchiaro and Weil ask whether financial development necessarily promotes long-run economic growth, or whether congestion externalities in R&D markets can offset — and even …

Gaurav Khanna · Emir Murathanoglu · Caroline Theoharides · Dean Yang

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question This paper asks how persistent increases in international migrant income prospects affect long-run economic development in migrant-origin areas. The central …

Andrea Matranga · Timur Natkhov

This paper investigates the origins of serfdom in early modern Russia, arguing that the institution consolidated primarily through political economy dynamics between the crown and a landholding …

Ping Wang · Tsz-Nga Wong

Wang and Wong develop a continuous-time labor-search model to assess the dynamic effects of generative AI (GenAI) on labor productivity and unemployment. The paper is motivated by conflicting …

Bruno Pellegrino · Enrico Spolaore · Romain Wacziarg

Overview Research Question. Why do observed international investment positions and cross-country differences in rates of return to capital fail to conform to a frictionless capital-market benchmark? …

Anna Tompsett

This paper measures the causal effects of land transport infrastructure on economic activity, exploiting quasi-experimental variation in bridge construction over the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in the …

Matti Liski · François Salanie

This paper develops a general model of experimentation under catastrophe risk in which the catastrophe is triggered when a stock variable exceeds an unknown threshold, but occurs only after a …

Giorgio Chiovelli · Stelios Michalopoulos · Elias Papaioannou · Sandra Sequeira

This paper examines the impact of conflict-driven forced displacement on human capital accumulation using the Mozambican civil war (1977–1992) as the empirical setting. During this war, over four …

J. Carter Braxton

This comment, written by J. Carter Braxton (University of Wisconsin), discusses the paper “Artificial Intelligence and Technological Unemployment” by Wang and Wong (2025), which develops …

Andrea Chiavari

This paper asks how rising returns to scale in production contributed to three concurrent U.S. secular trends since 1980: declining business dynamism, rising markups, and growing firm expenditures on …

Marek Ignaszak · Petr Sedláček

This paper asks whether firm-level customer acquisition — distinct from productivity differences — is a quantitatively important driver of aggregate economic growth, and whether ignoring it distorts …

Amory Gethin

Layer 1 — Core Argument This paper constructs the first estimates of the aggregate and distributional effects of worldwide educational expansion since 1980 by developing a “distributional growth …

Ali Almelhem · Murat Iyigun · Austin Kennedy · Jared Rubin

This paper tests Joel Mokyr’s claim that Britain’s industrialization was preceded and enabled by a cultural shift — specifically, that Enlightenment ideals produced a …

Timothy Besley · Christopher Dann · Sacha Dray

This paper investigates whether individuals who have experienced stronger GDP growth over their lifetimes are more likely to trust their national government. The authors — Besley, Dann, and Dray — …

Karam Jo · Seula Kim

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question. Jo and Kim ask two related questions: (1) How do firms use different types of innovation when learning others’ technology takes time? (2) How does this …

Esther Duflo · Pascaline Dupas · Elizabeth Spelke · Mark Walsh

This paper provides experimental evidence on the intergenerational impacts of secondary education subsidies in a low-income context, leveraging a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in rural …

Abu Siddique · Michael Vlassopoulos · Yves Zenou

This paper investigates whether virtual contact — exposure to an outgroup through a documentary film — can promote interethnic harmony, and whether targeting network-central individuals amplifies …

Gabriel Kreindler · Arya Gaduh · Tilman Graff · Rema Hanna · Benjamin A. Olken

This paper studies how commuter preferences over wait times, travel times, and transfers should shape the design of urban bus networks, using the world’s largest Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system — …

Fabio Bertolotti

This paper examines how anticipated changes in patent term affect R&D and innovation, using the U.S. ratification of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement in …

José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez · Salvador Gil-Guirado · Nicholas Ryan

This paper studies rainmaking as an instrumental religious belief. The central research question is: why do people believe that prayer can bring rain, even though it does not work? The authors develop …

Samuel Bazzi · Masyhur Hilmy · Benjamin Marx

This paper studies how Indonesia’s Islamic education sector responded to one of the largest state-driven mass schooling expansions in history — the SD INPRES program (Sekolah Dasar Presidential …

Victor Gay · Paula E. Gobbi · Marc Goñi

Gay, Gobbi, and Goñi test Le Play’s (1875) hypothesis that the French Revolution contributed to France’s early fertility decline by abolishing impartible inheritance. In 1793, a series of …

Mariaflavia Harari · Maisy Wong

This paper estimates the long-term causal effects of the Kampung Improvement Program (KIP), one of the world’s largest slum upgrading programs, on urban development in Jakarta, Indonesia. KIP …

Nicola Mastrorocco · Edoardo Teso

Mastrorocco and Teso study how the internal organization of a state evolves during national development, framing state capacity as an organizational — specifically a principal-agent — problem. Using a …

Nicolas Coeurdacier · Florian Oswald · Marc Teignier

This paper asks how cities grow in the process of structural transformation — specifically, whether urban expansion occurs at the intensive margin (higher density within a fixed area) or the extensive …

Michela Giorcelli · Bo Li

This paper estimates the causal effect of technology and knowledge transfers on early industrial development using the Sino-Soviet Alliance of the 1950s as a natural experiment. Between 1950 and 1957, …

Michael Wiebe

This paper is a comment on Moretti (2021b), which studied agglomeration effects for innovation by testing whether the size of technology clusters causes patenting. The original paper (M21) used US …

Tanguy Bernard · Stefan Dercon · Kate Orkin · Giulio Schinaia · Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse

This paper tests whether a light-touch behavioral intervention targeting aspirations can produce persistent economic effects on a poor rural population. The research question is whether changing how …

Andrew Garin · Jonathan Rothbaum

Overview Research Question. Does government-led construction of large manufacturing plants in previously under-industrialized regions generate long-run improvements in regional economic development …

Adrien Bilal · Diego R. Känzig

The paper shows that the macroeconomic impact of climate change is an order of magnitude larger than what standard country-level panel estimates suggest. The key identification innovation is to …

Isaac Baley · Andrés Blanco

Overview Research question. How does partial capital irreversibility — arising from a wedge between the purchase price and the resale (discounted) price of capital — shape the persistence and …

Clare Balboni · Robin Burgess · Benjamin A Olken

This paper studies the economics of illegal tropical forest fires in Indonesia, framed as a modern counterpart to Pigou’s canonical externality example of sparks from railway engines. The …

Natalie Bau · Gaurav Khanna · Corinne Low · Alessandra Voena

This paper asks whether dowry — a transfer from the bride’s family to the groom’s household upon marriage, prevalent throughout India — enables male migration by providing liquidity that …

Kieu-Trang Nguyen

This paper investigates whether and how a CEO’s inherited generalized trust enhances innovation within firms, offering a micro-foundation for the well-documented macro-level relationship between …

Paul Bouscasse · Emi Nakamura · Jón Steinsson

Overview Research Question. When did sustained productivity growth begin in England? This paper constructs new estimates of the evolution of productivity in England from 1250 to 1870, with the goal of …