Research papers

Place-based policy in the United States comprises a wide range of government programs that are spread across federal, state, and local agencies and that rely on public, private, and nonprofit organizations for policy design and implementation. We document...

Manufacturing generates very little employment in the developing world. Urban jobs are predominantly informal, unproductive, and in services. It seems unlikely that manufacturing will be able to absorb the new increments to the labor force or create more...

Recent growth accelerations in Africa are characterized by declining shares of the labor force employed in agriculture, increasing labor productivity in agriculture, and declining labor productivity in modern sectors such as manufacturing. To shed light...

We assemble a dataset of the universe of economics and business journal articles published since 1980 to assess differences in the levels and trends of the global distribution of authorship in economics journals and citations by country/region, quality of...

We advance principles for the construction of a stable and broadly beneficial world order that does not require significant commonality in interests and values among states. In particular, we propose a ‘meta-regime’ as a device for structuring a...

We distinguish between ideational and interest-based appeals to voters on the supply side of politics, integrating the Keynes-Hayek perspective on the importance of ideas with the Stigler-Becker approach emphasizing vested interests. In our model...

We discuss the considerable literature that has developed in recent years providing rigorous evidence on how industrial policies work. This literature is a significant improvement over the earlier generation of empirical work, which was largely...