In Davis and Gertler (2015), we used household-level microdata from Mexico to predict future air conditioning adoption as a function of income and temperature. Revisiting these predictions with 12 ...

As geopolitical tensions intensify, great powers often turn to trade policy to influence international alignment. We examine the optimal design of tariffs in a world where large countries care not ...

Gravity-based cross-sectional evidence indicates that currency unions stimulate trade; cross-sectional evidence indicates that trade stimulates output. This paper estimates the effect that currency ...

We combine nine previously proposed measures to construct an index of political polarization among US adults. We find that the growth in polarization in recent years is largest for the demographic ...

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, ...

The decision by developing countries to open up their economies to foreign trade and investment in the 1980s and 1990s was a momentous event in world history. How and why did this trade policy ...

This paper tests how people’s moral values influence their views of debt contracts. We ask participants to make decisions about debt contracts in different hypothetical situations (vignettes). We ...

Informational nudges to encourage energy conservation or load shifting have been tried in various contexts. This paper studies a program run by a small municipally owned electric utility to reduce ...

Strategic models of legislative bargaining predict that proposers can extract high shares of economic surplus by identifying and exploiting weak coalition partners. However, strength and weakness can ...

Novel co-inventors introduce new products or services with the potential for large returns, but do so at high costs and with uncertain outcomes. Similar firms investing in incremental co-invention ...

This paper examines how entrepreneurs strategically design experiments to convince venture capitalists (VCs) to fund their projects when investors interpret data through heterogeneous statistical ...

This paper tests the long-standing hypothesis that China's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which exterminated sparrows despite scientists’ warnings about their pest-control role, exacerbated the Great ...