Workplace safety policies are designed to ensure that employers internalize the costs of injuries, but employers can undermine these policies with threats of dismissal. We show that states’ adoption of the public policy exception to at-will employment—an exception forbidding employers from firing workers for filing workers’ compensation claims or for whistleblowing—led to a substantial reduction in injuries. The widespread adoption of the public policy exception explains 14% of the decline in fatal injury rates between 1979 and 1994. Statutory protections from retaliatory firing also improved safety, but only when employers faced sufficiently strong penalties for violating them.

We report the results of a cost-effective intervention to improve workers' performance in small cassava processing firms in Ghana. We train workers to track their daily output and then randomly assign a sub-sample to set daily production goals. Achieving or missing a goal does not carry monetary consequences. Goal setting increases workers' output by 16%, their productivity by 8% and the average product of labor in firms by 13%. Goal setting is particularly effective for piece-rate workers, increasing their output by 32% and productivity by 24%. While not conclusive, evidence suggests that goals serve as a self-regulation device.

Using a unique and rich database of high-technology firms in China, we show that effective enforcement of intellectual property rights at the provincial level is critical in encouraging financing and investing in R&D. Better enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights positively affects firms' ability to acquire new external debt and allows firms to invest in more R&D, generate more innovation patents, and produce more sales from new products. Our results suggest that facilitating financing and investing in R&D are the channels through which better IP rights enforcement can affect economic growth.

We determine how time delays affect trade, using newly collected data on the days it takes to move standard cargo from the factory gate to the ship in 98 countries. We estimate a difference gravity equation and find that each additional day that a product is delayed prior to being shipped reduces trade by more than 1%. Put differently, each day is equivalent to a country distancing itself from its trade partners by about 70 km on average. We also find that delays have a relatively greater impact on exports of time-sensitive goods, such as perishable agricultural products.

In this paper we consider a nonparametric regression model that admits a mix of continuous and discrete regressors, some of which may in fact be redundant (that is, irrelevant). We show that, asymptotically, a data-driven least squares cross-validation method can remove irrelevant regressors. Simulations reveal that this “automatic dimensionality reduction” feature is very effective in finite-sample settings.

This paper studies the causal effect of education on decision making. In 1972, England raised its minimum school-leaving age from 15 to 16 for students born after September 1, 1957. An online survey was conducted with 2,700 individuals born in a 36-month window on either side of this date. Participants made 25 incentivized risk choices that allow us to measure multiple dimensions of decision making. Despite the policy having effects on education, educational qualifications, and income, we find no effects of the policy on decision making or decision-making quality.

This paper examines the claim that exchange rate regimes are of little salience in the transmission of global financial conditions to domestic financial and macroeconomic conditions by focusing on a sample of about forty emerging market countries over 1986 to 2013. Our findings show that exchange rate regimes do matter. The transmission of global financial shocks to domestic credit and house price growth, as well as to banking sector leverage and domestic output, is magnified under fixed exchange rate regimes relative to more flexible (though not necessarily fully flexible) exchange rate regimes.

We test for customer discrimination with data from more than 800 retail stores employing over 70,000 individuals matched to census data on the demographics of each store's community. While our tests detect some increase in sales when the workforce more closely resembles potential customers, the effects we find are modest in magnitude. Customer discrimination is neither strong nor pervasive. We find little payoff to matching employee demographics to those of potential customers except when the customers do not speak English.

We characterize asset return linkages during periods of stress by an extremal dependence measure. Contrary to correlation analysis, this nonparametric measure is not predisposed toward the normal distribution and can allow for nonlinear relationships. Our estimates for the G-5 countries suggest that simultaneous crashes between stock markets are much more likely than between bond markets. However, for the assessment of financial system stability the widely disregarded cross-asset perspective is particularly important. For example, our data show that stock-bond contagion is approximately as frequent as flight to quality from stocks into bonds. Extreme cross-border linkages are surprisingly similar to national linkages, illustrating a potential downside to international financial integration.