(October 2026) - We establish a link between labor scarcity and the adoption of laborsaving technology in industrializing England. During the Napoleonic Wars, more than 10 percent of the male population served in the armed forces. Where recruitment was heavy, more machines economizing on labor were adopted. Naval recruitment, instrumented by warships' coastal access, provides exogenous variation in labor scarcity and suggests that the link between labor shortages and adoption is causal. Where mechanical skills were abundant, the impact of labor scarcity on adoption appears to be larger.

This paper provides a direct replication of Fehr et al. (2022), who examine whether information about individuals’ position in the global income distr…

Dear Jane, It is early morning in Nîmes. I am waiting for coffee while looking out of the window of the small hotel where Susie and I are staying. The square below is waking up. There are a few cars, ...

This study investigates recruitment bias in the academic job market. We examine the link between statistical significance and placement outcomes for 2…

This paper argues that the decline in the labor share is not driven by the overall quantity of capital, but by its changing composition. Constructing …

When I taught my first PhD-level methods course, I invited students to submit questions about any topic in statistics or methodology. Six out of 10 students asked about the same topic: robust & cluste...

Dutch novelist, poet and travel writer who reported on the Hungarian revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall

Global economic development is hitting a wall

There have been many studies estimating the causal effect of an additional year of education on earnings. The majority employ administrative changes in the minimum school-leaving age as the mechanism...

Now 25 years old, it is Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki's most complex work. But its mishandling in the West speaks of fundamental artistic differences, writes Stephen Kelly.

The widely-used common correlated effects (CCE) estimator, pioneered by Pesaran (2006), is computed using least squares applied to auxiliary regressio…

(February 2026) - We show that subjective assessments of employee "potential" contribute to gender gaps in promotion and pay. Using data on 29,809 management-track employees from a large retail chain,...

In a world that’s on fire, what do we do with art? Like, what can music actually do? Today, Jad Abumrad is back with his first major project since Dolly Parton’s America. Fela Kuti: F...

We have a streetlight problem

Abstract. Using a novel regional database covering over 200 elections in several European countries, this article provides new empirical evidence on the political consequences of fiscal consolidations...

The foundational concept that holds empirical economics together

This week’s local elections are the latest reminder that when social democrats move rightwards, they’re making a mistake, says academic and author Cas Mudde

TV & Film Podcast · Updated Weekly · What Went Wrong covers Hollywood’s most notoriously disastrous movie productions, digging into the behind-the-scenes insanity of everything from massive flops to r...

Over the past year, various RePEc services have been struggling with issues stemming from artificial intelligence robots (AI bots), and this post is a short summary of what happening and where we s…

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, an...

Lauren Gilbert argues that migrants to the UK are net fiscal contributors, adding much more to the economy than they take out, and that the recent collapse in immigration will harm the UK's economic p...

Rev Clive Foster says rhetoric targeting legal migrants makes some wonder if history is repeating itself