The Review of Economic Studies is one of the core journals in economics. It is essential reading for economists, consistently ranking among the top five journals.

The gains from monetary policy cooperation depend on real and financial distortions in the economy and evolve dynamically with prevailing economic conditions. We show that, with international trade in assets, these gains are driven by asymmetric cross-border developments in productivity and savings, and can reach multiples of the cost of economic fluctuations.

We characterize the conditions under which a socially responsible (SR) fund induces firms to reduce externalities, even when profit-seeking capital is in perfectly elastic supply. Such impact requires that the SR fund’s mandate permits the fund to trade off financial performance against reductions in social costs — relative to the counterfactual in which the fund does not invest in a given firm. Based on such an impact mandate, we derive the social profitability index (SPI), an investment criterion that characterizes the optimal ranking of impact investments when SR capital is scarce.

How do innovation and education policy affect individual career choices and aggregate productivity? This paper analyzes the effect of R&D subsidies and higher education policy on productivity growth through the supply of innovative talent. We put scarce talent, higher education attainment, and career choice at the center of a new endogenous growth framework with individual-level heterogeneity in talent, financial resources, and preferences. We link the model to micro-level data from Denmark on the backgrounds of who obtains a PhD and becomes an inventor and the outcomes of a set of policy interventions.

I model and quantify the impact of a new dimension of globalization: offshore R&D. In the model, firms employ researchers across the globe to develop new product blueprints and then engage in offshore production and exporting. Frictions impeding trade and the separation of production from R&D lead to a ‘market-access’ motive for offshore R&D, while cross-country differences in the distributions of firm knowhow and worker ability generate a ‘talent-acquisition’ motive. I discipline the model using empirical facts derived from a new firm-level dataset. Counterfactual experiments show that the two motives can account for a significant portion of the observed offshore R&D.

Many studies have documented that the sales concentration of U.S. producers has risen in recent decades. In this paper, we show that this increase was accompanied by more entry and growth of foreign competitors. Using confidential census data covering the universe of all firm sales in the U.S. manufacturing sector, we find that rising import competition increased concentration among U.S. firms by reallocating sales from smaller to larger U.S. firms and by causing firm exit. However, this increase in production concentration was counteracted by the expansion of foreign firms, which reduced domestic firms’ share of the U.S. market inclusive of foreign firms’ sales.

This study argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions over the course of industrialization was partly driven by complementarity between physical capital and effective labor in manufacturing. Given the difficulty of extracting labor effort in care-intensive industrial tasks through monitoring and punishment, capital-owning elites ultimately chose to emancipate workers to induce their supply of effective labor and, thus, boost the return to physical capital. This hypothesis is empirically examined in the context of serf emancipation in nineteenth-century Prussia.