We exploit historical data on planned highways, railroads, and exploration routes as sources of exogenous variation in order to estimate the effect of interstate highways on regional innovation: a 10% increase in a region's stock of highways causes a 1.7% increase in regional patenting over a five-year period. In terms of the mechanism, we report evidence that roads facilitate local knowledge flows, increasing the likelihood that innovators access knowledge inputs from local but more distant neighbors. Thus, transportation infrastructure may spur regional growth above and beyond the more commonly discussed agglomeration economies predicated on an inflow of new workers.

Many prior treatments of agglomeration explicitly or implicitly assume that all industries agglomerate for the same reasons. This paper uses U.K. establishment-level coagglomeration data to document substantial heterogeneity across industries in the microfoundations of agglomeration economies. It finds robust evidence of organizational and adaptive agglomeration forces as discussed by Chinitz (1961), Vernon (1960), and Jacobs (1969). These forces interact with the traditional Marshallian (1890) factors of input sharing, labor pooling, and knowledge spillovers, establishing a previously unrecognized complementarity between the approaches of Marshall and Jacobs, as well as others, to the analysis of agglomeration

We examine the extent to which vertical and horizontal market structure can together explain incomplete retail pass-through. To answer this question, we use scanner data from a large U.S. retailer to estimate product level pass-through for three vertical structures: national brands, private label goods not manufactured by the retailer, and private label goods manufactured by the retailer. Our approach circumvents issues associated with internal firm prices and demonstrates that accounting for horizontal market structure is important for measuring the effects of vertical integration and reduced double marginalization on pass-through.

Using listings data, we construct a new repeat-sales house price index that describes house values at the contract date when the price is determined rather than the closing date when the property is transferred. We showthat this difference in timing helps explain several puzzles about house prices, including their strong short-term serial correlation and their weak correlation with stock prices and macroeconomic news shocks. In addition, we showthat a variant of our index that relies exclusively on listings data for recent transactions accurately reveals trends in house prices several months before existing price indexes like Case-Shiller become available.

We present the results of a field experiment conducted at Harvard Medical School to understand the extent to which search costs affect matching among scientific collaborators. We generated exogenous variation in search costs for pairs of potential collaborators by randomly assigning individuals to 90-minute structured information-sharing sessions as part of a grant funding opportunity. We estimate that the treatment increases the probability of grant co-application of a given pair of researchers by 75%. The findings suggest that matching between scientists is subject to considerable frictions, even in the case of geographically-proximate scientists working in the same institutional context

This paper investigates how collusion between regulators and firms affects workplace safety using the case of China’s coal mine deaths. We argue that decentralization makes collusion more likely and that its effect is strengthened if the transaction costs of collusion are lower. These hypotheses are tested by investigating the impact of decentralization contingent on regulators’ characteristics. Exploring both decentralization and centralization reforms in the coal mine industry, we find that decentralization is correlated with an increase in coal mine death rates. Moreover, this increase in mortality is larger for the regulators with lower transaction costs (proxied by the locality of origin

Admission practices at high-profile universities are often criticized for undermining academic merit. Popular tests for detecting such biases suffer from omitted characteristic bias. We develop a bounds-based test to circumvent this problem. We assume that students who are better qualified on observableswould, on average, appear academically stronger to admission officers based on unobservables. This assumption reveals the sign of differences in admission standards across demographic groups that are robust to omitted characteristics. Applying our methods to admissions data from a British university, we find higher admission standards for men and slightly higher ones for private school applicants, despite equal admission success probability across gender and school background.

We study gender spillovers in career advancement using eleven years of employer-employee matched data on white-collar workers at over 4, 000 private sector workplaces in Norway. Our data allow us to define seven hierarchical ranks that are consistent across plants and over time and track promotions even for individuals who change employers. We find positive spillovers across ranks (flowing from higher-ranking to lower-ranking women) but negative spillovers within ranks. The finding of narrower gender gaps in promotions for workers with more female bosses suggests that policies that increase female representation in corporate leadership can have spillover benefits to women in lower ranks.

This paper estimates the effect of Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection on financial health using a new data set linking bankruptcy filings to credit bureau records. Our empirical strategy uses the leniency of randomly assigned judges as an instrument for Chapter 13 protection. We find that Chapter 13 protection decreases an index measuring adverse financial events such as civil judgments and repossessions by 0.323 standard deviations and increases the probability of being a homeowner by 13.2 percentage points. Chapter 13 protection has little impact on open unsecured debt but decreases the amount of debt in collections by $1,333

African elections often reveal low levels of political accountability. We assess different forms of voter education during an election in Mozambique. Three interventions providing information to voters and calling for their participation were randomized: an information campaign using SMS, an SMS hotline for electoral misconduct, and the distribution of a free newspaper. To measure impact, we look at official electoral results, reports by electoral observers, and behavioral and survey data. We find positive effects of all treatments on voter turnout. However, only the distribution of the free newspaper led to more accountability-based participation and to a decrease in electoral problems.