In this paper, we compare the characteristics of real world financial contracts to their counterparts in financial contracting theory. We do so by conducting a detailed study of actual contracts ...

Science of Science Funding is an NBER initiative, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which seeks to improve understanding of effective methods of supporting scientific research. Its goal is ...

The US trade war against China in 2018–2019 can either enhance or diminish the US soft power in China, depending on whether it is recognized as legitimate by Chinese citizens. We study how the ...

We explore how socio-economic background shapes academia, collecting the largest dataset of U.S. academics’ backgrounds and research output. Individuals from poorer backgrounds have been severely ...

Altruism is a key component of medical professionalism that underlies the physician's role as a representative agent for patients. However, physician behavior can be influenced when private gains ...

Is the top tail of wealth a set of fixed individuals or is there substantial turnover? We estimate upper-tail wealth dynamics during the Gilded Age and beyond, a time of rapid wealth accumulation and ...

This paper explores past episodes of technological disruption in the US labor market, with the goal of learning lessons about the likely future impact of artificial intelligence (AI). We measure ...

We decompose inflation into the component due to macroeconomic shocks and the granular residuals capturing the impact of individual firms and product categories, respectively. In advanced economies, ...

In this study, we investigate whether reproductive rights affect migration. We do so using a synthetic difference-in-differences design that leverages variation from the 2022 Dobbs decision, which ...

Using quarterly micro data on capacity utilization among Swedish manufacturing firms, we show that idiosyncratic factors are much more important than aggregate influences in explaining variation in ...

This paper studies the effects of the largest residential racial desegregation initiative in U.S. history, the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, Gautreaux moved ...

Our setting is dividend recapitalizations in private equity (PE), where portfolio companies take on new debt to pay investor returns. After accounting for positive selection into more debt, we show ...