We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995. Pooling data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol generated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-controlled units, accounting for a quarter of the $7.8 billion in Cambridge residential property appreciation during this period. The majority of this contribution stems from induced appreciation of never-controlled properties. Residential investment explains only a small fraction of the total.

Recent evidence indicates that boys and girls are differently affected by the quantity and quality of family inputs received in childhood. We assess whether this is also true for schooling inputs. Using matched Florida birth and school administrative records, we estimate the causal effect of school quality on the gender gap in educational outcomes by contrasting opposite-sex siblings who attend the same sets of schools--thereby purging family heterogeneity--and leveraging within-family variation in school quality arising from family moves. Investigating middle school test scores, absences and suspensions, we find that boys benefit more than girls from cumulative exposure to higher quality schools.

Has rising import competition contributed to the polarization of US politics? Analyzing multiple measures of political expression and results of congressional and presidential elections spanning the period 2000 through 2016, we find strong though not definitive evidence of an ideological realignment in trade-exposed local labor markets that commences prior to the divisive 2016 US presidential election. Exploiting the exogenous component of rising import competition by China, we find that trade exposed electoral districts simultaneously exhibit growing ideological polarization in some domains, meaning expanding support for both strong-left and strong-right views, and pure rightward shifts in others. Specifically, trade-impacted commuting zones or districts saw an increasing market share for the Fox News channel (a rightward shift), stronger ideological polarization in campaign contributions (a polarized shift), and a relative rise in the likelihood of electing a Republican to Congress (a rightward shift). Trade-exposed counties with an initial majority White population became more likely to elect a GOP conservative, while trade-exposed counties with an initial majority-minority population became more likely to elect a liberal Democrat, where in both sets of counties, these gains came at the expense of moderate Democrats (a polarized shift). In presidential elections, counties with greater trade exposure shifted toward the Republican candidate (a rightward shift). These results broadly support an emerging political economy literature that connects adverse economic shocks to sharp ideological realignments that cleave along racial and ethnic lines and induce discrete shifts in political preferences and economic policy. (JEL D72, F14, J15, L82, R23)

An increasingly influential 'technological-discontinuity' paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using US manufacturing industries. There is some limited support for more rapid productivity growth in IT-intensive industries depending on the exact measures, though not since the late 1990s. Most challenging to this paradigm, and to our expectations, is that output contracts in IT-intensive industries relative to the rest of manufacturing. Productivity increases, when detectable, result from the even faster declines in employment.

The recent fall of labor's share of GDP in numerous countries is well-documented, but its causes are poorly understood. We sketch a “superstar firm” model where industries are increasingly characterized by “winner take most” competition, leading a small number of highly profitable (and low labor share) firms to command growing market share. Building on Autor et al. (2017), we evaluate and confirm two core claims of the superstar firm hypothesis: the concentration of sales among firms within industries has risen across much of the private sector; and industries with larger increases in concentration exhibit a larger decline in labor's share.