Research

working Papers and research

Efraim Benmelech

• “The Determinants of The Chinese Household Savings Rate”, with Scott Baker, Zhishu Yang, and Qi Zhang (2023)
• “The Resilience of the U.S. Corporate Bond Market During Financial  Crises”, with Bo Becker (2021)
•  “The Determinants of Fiscal and Monetary Policies During the Covid-19 Crisis”, with Nitzan Tzur-Ilan (2020)

Nicola Bianchi

• “Countries for Old Men: An Analysis of the Age Wage Gap”, with Matteo Paradisi 
• “One Cohort at a Time: A New Perspective on the Declining Gender Pay Gap”, with Jaime Arellano-Bover, Salvatore Lattanzio, and Matteo Paradisi

Mario Cannella

• “Electoral Effects of U.S. Soft Power: Evidence from Hollywood Movies in Cold War Italy” with Matteo Magnaricotte (2023)
• “The Political Legacy of Nazi Annexation,” with Alexey Makarin and Ricardo Pique (2020)

Bruno Caprettini

• “From Welfare to Warfare: New Deal Spending and Patriotism during World War II” (2020)
• “The Electoral Impact of Wealth Redistribution: Evidence from the Italian Land Reform” (2019)

Lou Cain

• “Urbanization, Sanitation, and Mortality in the Progressive Era, 1899-1929,” with Elyce Rotella (2020)
• “Intra-Urban Health Disparities: Survival and Aging in the Wards of 19th-Century American Cities,” with Sok Chul Hong (2018)

Quoc-Anh Do

• “Power, Scrutiny, and Congressmen’s Favoritism for Friends’ Firms”, with Yen-Teik Lee, Bang D. Nguyen, and Kieu-Trang Nguyen (2021)
• “J’Accuse! Antisemitism and Financial Markets in the time of the Dreyfus Affair,” with Roberto Galbiati, Benjamin Marx, and Miguel A. Ortiz Serrano (2021)
• “Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians”, with Yann Algan, Nicolò Dalvit, and Yves Zenou (2020)
• “Emperors without Scepters: Early Colonial Leaders’ Personality and Civil Conflicts”, with Sacha Dray, Elise Huillery, and Jean-Luis Keene (2020)

Carola Frydman

• “The Value of Ratings: Evidence from their Introduction in Securities Markets”, with Asaf Bernstein and Eric Hilt (2023)
• “A Real Great Compression: Inflation and Inequality in the 1940s”, with Raven Molloy
• “The Birth of Finance Capitalism in the United States: Securities Underwriters on Corporate Boards, 1880-1920”, with Eric Hilt and Lauren Mostrom

Leander Heldring

• “Bureaucracy as a tool for politicians: evidence from Weimar and Nazi Germany” (2020)
• “Institutional Adaptation to Environmental Change,” with Mattia C. Bertazzini and Robert C. Allen (2020)
• “The Long-Run Impact of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries,” with James A. Robinson and Sebastian Vollmer (2020)

Riccardo Marchingiglio

• “The Economics of Gender-Specific Minimum-Wage Legislation,” with Michael Poyker (2021)
• “Local Corruption and Misreported Income: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit”, with Enrico Berkes (2017)

Filippo Mezzanotti

• “Research and/or Development? Financial Frictions and Innovation Investment”, with Tim Simcoe (2023)
• “Innovation and Appropriability: Revisiting the Role of Intellectual Property”, with Tim Simcoe (2023)
• “Technology Adoption and Career Concerns: Evidence from the Adoption of Digital Technology in Motion Pictures”, with Grant Goehring and S. Abraham Ravid (2023)
• “Bank Distress and Manufacturing: Evidence from the Great Depression”, with James Lee (2017)

Joel Mokyr

• “The Wheels of Change: Technology Adoption, Millwrights, and path dependence in Britain’s Industrialization” with Assaf Sarid and Karine van der Beek (2020)
• “The Mechanics of the Industrial Revolution” with Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda (2020)
• “Attitudes, Aptitudes, and the Roots of the Great Enrichment” (2019)

Jacopo Ponticelli

• “Information Frictions and Take-up of Government Credit Programs”, with Apoorv Gupta and Andrea Tesei (2023)
• “Eclipses and the Memory of Revolutions: Evidence from China,” with Meng Miao and Yi Shao (2023)
• “The Effects of Climate Change on Labor and Capital Reallocation”, with Christoph Albert and Paula Bustos (2022)
• “Industrialization without Innovation”, with Paula Bustos, Juanma Castro Vincenzi , and Joan Monras (2022)

Nancy Qian

• “The Causes of the Ukrainian Famine”, with Andrei Markevich and Natalya Naumenko (2023)
• “The Long-run Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act”, with Joe Long, Carlo Medici and Macro Tabellini (2023)
• “The Political-Economic Determinants of Nuclear Energy: Evidence from Chernobyl”,  with Alexey Makarin and Shaoda Wang (2022)
• “Discrimination, Disenfranchisement and WWII U.S. Military Enlistment”, with Marco Tabellini (2021)

Michele Rosenberg

• “Slavocracy: Elite Capture and the Support for Slavery”, with Federico Masera
• “Agricultural Modernization and Land Conflict”, with Stefano Falcone
• “Factory Location: Resistance to Technology Adoption and Local Institutions”, with Federico Curci
• “The Power of Narratives: Anti-Black Attitudes and Violence in the US South”, (with Federico Masera, and Sarah Walker) 
• “External Players in the Political Economy of Natural Resources”

Edoardo Teso

• ”Politics at Work”, with Emanuele Colonnelli and Valdemar Pinho Neto
• ”State Capacity as an Organizational Problem. Evidence from the Growth of the U.S. State over 100 Years”, with Nicola Mastrorocco

Publications

Efraim Benmelech

• “Making the House a Home: the Stimulative Effect of Home Purchases on Consumption and Investment”, with Adam Guren and Brian Melzer, in the Review of Financial Studies (2023)
• “Secured Credit Spreads and the Issuance of Secured Debt”, with Nitish Kumar and Raghuram Rajan, in the Journal of Financial Economics (2022)
• “Strong Employers and Weak Employees: How Does Employer Concentration Affect Wages?”, with Nittai Bergman and Hyunseob Kim, in the Journal of Human Resources (2022)
• “Financing Labor”, with Nittai Bergman and Amit Seru, in the Review of Finance (2021)
• “Private and Social Returns to R&D: Drug Development and Demographics”, with Jan Eberly, Dimitris Papanikolaou and Josh Krieger, in the American Economic Review (2021)
• “Civic Capital and Social Distancing during the Covid-19 Pandemic”, with John Barrios, Yael Hockberg, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales, in the Journal of Public Economics (2021)
• “What Explains the Flow of Foreign Fighters to ISIS?”, with Esteban Klor, in Terrorism and Political Violence (2020)
• “Financial Frictions and Employment during the Great Depression,” with Carola Frydman and Dimitris Papanikolaou in Journal of Financial Economics (2019)
• “The Agglomeration of Bankruptcy”, with Nittai Bergman, Anna Milanez, and Vladimir Mukharlyamov, in the Review of Financial Studies (2019)
• “Credit Market Freezes,” with Nittai K. Bergman, in the National Bureau of Economic Research (2018)
• “The Political Economy of Financial Regulation: Evidence from U.S. State Usury Laws in the 19th Century,” with Tobias J. Moskowitz, in The Journal of Finance (2010)

Nicola Bianchi

• “The Effects of Computer-Assisted Learning on Students’ Long-Term Development”, with Yi Lu and Hong Song, in the Journal of Development Economics (2022)

• “The Indirect Effects of Educational Expansions: Evidence from a Large Enrollment Increase in University Majors,” in Journal of Labor Economics (2019)
• “Scientific Education and Innovation: From Technical Diplomas to University STEM Degrees,” with Michela Giorcelli, in Journal of the European Economic Association (2019)
• “Compulsory Licensing and Innovation. Historical Evidence From German Patents After WWI,” with Petra Moser and Joerg Baten, in Journal of Development Economics (2017)

Lou Cain

• “Measuring Slavery in 2016 Dollars,” with Samuel H. Williamson (2020)
• “Defining Measures of Worth, Most are better than the CPI,” with Samuel H. Williamson (2020)
• “Services in American Economic History,” with Stephen Broadberry and Thomas Weiss, in The Oxford Handbook of American Economic History (2018)
• “Health, Disease and Sanitation in American Economic History,” with Hoyt Bleakley and Sok Chul Hong, in the Oxford Handbook of American Economic History (2018)
• “Introduction,” with Price Fishback and Paul Rhode, in the Oxford Handbook of American Economic History (2018)
• “A Century of Environmental Legislation,” with Brooks Kaiser, in Research in Economic History, volume 32 (2016)

Quoc-Anh Do

• “Capital Cities, Conflict, and Misgovernance,” with Filipe R. Campante and Bernardo Guimaraes, in American Economic Journal (2019)
  • “Capital Cities, Conflict, and Misgovernance: Online Appendix,” with Filipe R. Campante and Bernardo Guimaraes

Matthias Doepke

• “Gendered Impacts of Covid-19 in Developing Countries”, with Titan Alon, Kristina Manysheva, and Michèle Tertilt, in AEA Papers and Proceedings (2022)
• “From Mancession to Shecession: Women’s Employment in Regular and Pandemic Recessions”, with Titan Alon, Sena Coskun, David Koll, and Michèle Tertilt, in the NBER Macroeconomics Annual (2022)
• “When the Great Equalizer Shuts Down: Schools, Peers, and Parents in Pandemic Times”, with Francesco Agostinelli, Giuseppe Sorrenti, and Fabrizio Zilibotti, in the Journal of Public Economics (2022)
• “Bargaining over Babies: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications”, with Fabian Kindermann, in the American Economic Review (2019)
• “Clans, Guilds, and Markets: Apprenticeship Institutions and Growth in The Preindustrial Economy,” with David de la Croix and Joel Mokyr, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2018)
• “Money as a Unit of Account,“ with Martin Schneider, in Econometrica (2017)
• “The Baby Boom and World War II: A Macroeconomic Analysis,” with Moshe Hazan and Yishay D. Maoz, in the Review of Economic Studies (2015)

Joseph Ferrie

• “Do Grandparents Matter? Multigenerational Mobility in the U.S., 1940-2015,” with Catherine Massey and Jonathan Rothbaum, forthcoming in Journal of Labor Economics (2020)
• “Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s,” with Xi Song, Catherine G. Massey, Karen A. Rolf, Jonathan L. Rothbaum, and Yu Xie in PNAS (2020)

Carola Frydman

• “Financial frictions and employment during the Great Depression,” with Efraim Benmelech and Dimitris Papanikolaou, in Journal of Financial Economics (2019)
• “In search of ideas: Technological innovation and executive pay inequality,” with Dimitris Papanikolaou, in Journal of Financial Economics (2018)
• “Investment Banks as Corporate Monitors in the Early Twentieth Century United States,” with Eric Hilt, in American Economic Review (2017)
• “Economic Effects of Runs on Early “Shadow Banks”: Trust Companies and the Impact of the Panic of 1907,” with Eric Hilt and Lily Y. Zhou, in Journal of Political Economy (2015)
• “Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-Term Perspective, 1936–2005,” with Raven E. Saks in The Review of Financial Studies (2010)

Robert Gordon

• “How to Boost the Payoff from Innovation While Shrinking its Destructive Side Effects”, in the Business History Review (2021)
• “Transatlantic Technologies:  The Role of ICT in the Evolution of Productivity Growth in the U.S. and Europe,” with Hassan Sayed, in the International Productivity Monitor (2020)
• “The Industry Anatomy of the Transatlantic Productivity Growth Slowdown: Europe Chasing the American Frontier,” with Hassan Sayed, in the International Productivity Monitor (2019)

• The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (2017)

Walker Hanlon

• “Culture and the Historical Fertility Transition”, with Brian Beach, in the Review of Economics Studies (2023)
• “Spillover Effects of IP Protection in the Inter-war Aircraft Industry”, with Taylor Jaworski, in the Economic Journal (2022)
• “Recessions, Mortality, and Migration Bias: Evidence from the Lancashire Cotton Famine”, with Vellore Arthi and Brian Beach, in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2022)
• “Temperature, Disease, and Death in London: Analyzing Weekly Data for the Century from 1866-1965” with Casper Worm Hansen and Jake Kantor, in the Journal of Economic History (2021)
• “The Persistent Effect of Temporary Input Cost Advantages in Shipbuilding, 1850-1911”, in the Journal of the European Economic Association (2020)
• “Coal Smoke, City Growth, and the Costs of the Industrial Revolution”, in the Economic Journal (2020)
• “Skilled Immigrants and American Industrialization: Lessons from Newport News Shipyard”, in the Business History Review (2018)
• “Coal Smoke and Mortality in an Early Industrial Economy”, with Brian Beach, in the Economic Journal (2018)
• “Agglomeration: A Long-Run Panel Data Approach”, with Antonio Miscio, in the Journal of Urban Economics (2017)
• “Temporary Shocks and Persistent Effects in Urban Economies: Evidence from British Cities after the U.S. Civil War”, in the Review of Economics & Statistics (2017)
• “Necessity is the Mother of Invention: Input Supplies and Directed Technical Change”, in Econometrica (2015)
• “Killer Cities: Past and Present”, with Yuan Tian, in the American Economic Review, Papers & Proceeding (2015)
• “Do better monitoring institutions increase leadership quality in community organizations? Evidence from Uganda”, with Guy Grossman, in the American Journal of Political Science (2014)

Laura Hein

• Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after World War II, Bloomsbury Press and a Weatherhead Institute Imprint book (2018)
• “A Roundtable on Grant Madsen, Sovereign Soldiers: How the U.S. Military Transformed the Global Economy After World War II,” in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review (2018)
• “Raising Taxes for Democracy: The Japanese Policy Environment of the Shoup Mission,” with Mark Metzler, in The Shoup Mission to Japan: A History of Transnational Tax Reform (2013)

Leander Heldring

• “The Long-Run Impact of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries”, with James A. Robinson and Sebastian Vollmer, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2021)

• “The Origins of Violence in Rwanda,” in The Review of Economic Studies (2021)
• “Colonialism and Economic Development in Africa,” in The Review of Economic Studies (2020)

Ralf Meisenzahl

• “Internal Migration Patterns after the 2008 Financial Crisis: Evidence from a Credit Panel”, with Daniel Gallego, in the Chicago FED Insights (2022)
• “Public Goods Institutions, Human Capital, and Growth: Evidence from German History,” with Jeremiah E. Ditmar, in the Review of Economic Studies (2020)
• “Organization Matters: Trade Union Behavior during Peace and War,” in the Journal of Comparative Economics (2015)

Jesse McDevitt-Irwin

• “Infant mortality among US whites in the 19th century: New evidence from childhood sex ratios,” in Demographic Research (2025)
• “Child anemia and the 2008 food price crisis in Senegal,”  in Demographic Research (2024)

Joel Mokyr

• “Could Artisans Have Caused the Industrial Revolution?,” with Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda (2020)
• “Apprenticeship in Early Modern Europe” (2019)
• “The Past and the Future of Innovation: Some Lessons from Economic History” in Explorations in Economic History (2018)

Jacopo Ponticelli

• “Revealing Corruption: Firm and Worker Level Evidence from Brazil”, with Emanuele Colonnelli, Spyridon Lagaras, Mounu Prem, and Margarita Tsoutsoura, in the Journal of Financial Economics (2022)
• “Going Bankrupt in China”, with Bo Li, in the Review of Finance (2022)
• “Capital Accumulation and Structural Transformation”, with Paula Bustos and Gabriel Garber, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2020)
• “Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2008,” with Joachim Voth, in the Journal of Comparative Economics (2020)

Nancy Qian

• “The Rise and Fall of Local Elections in China: Theory and Empirical Evidence on the Autocrat’s Tradeoff”, with Monica Martinez-Bravo, Gerard Padró-i-Miquel and Yang Yao, in the American Economic Review (2022)
• “Immigrants and the Making of America,” with Nathan Nunn and Sandra Sequeira, in the Review of Economic Studies (2020)
• “On the Road: Access to Transportation Infrastructure and Economic Growth in China,” with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, in The Journal of Development Economics (2019)
• “Economic Transition and Private-Sector Labor Demand: Evidence from Urban China” with Lakshmi Iyer, Xin Meng, and Xiaoxue Zhao, in the Journal of Comparative Economics (2019)

Taco Terpstra

• “Mediterranean Silver Production and the Site of Antas, Sardinia”, in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology (2021)
• “The Imperial Cult and the Sacred Bonds of Roman Overseas Commerce”, in Roman Port Societies: The Evidence of Inscriptions (2020)
• “Roman technological progress in comparative context: The Roman Empire, Medieval Europe and Imperial China”, in Explorations in Economic History (2020)
• Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions (2019)
• “Introduction: A Roman Egyptian Mummy from Hawara”, with Essi Rönkkö and Marc Walton, in the Block Museum (2019)
• “Neo-Institutionalism in Ancient Economic History: The Road Ahead”, in A Research Agenda for New Institutional Economics (2018)

Edoardo Teso

• “Patronage and Selection in Public Sector Organizations”, with Emanuele Colonnelli and Mounu Prem, in the American Economic Review (2020)

• “The Long-Term Effect of Demographic Shocks on the Evolution of Gender Roles: Evidence from the Transatlantic Slave Trade” in The Journal of the European Economic Association (2019)

• “Intergenerational Mobility and Preferences for Redistribution” with Alberto Alesina and Stefanie Stantcheva, in the
  American Economic Review (2018)