Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 12.
(refine search)
Working Paper
Cross-border Patenting, Globalization, and Development
We build a stylized model that captures the relationships between cross-border patenting, globalization, and development. Our theory delivers a gravity equation for cross-border patents. To test the model’s predictions, we compile a new dataset that tracks patents within and between countries and industries, for 1980-2019. The econometric analysis reveals a strong, positive impact of policy and globalization on cross-border patent flows, especially from North to South. A counterfactual welfare analysis suggests that the increase in patent flows from North to South has benefited both ...
Journal Article
Financing hope
Working Paper
The great housing boom of China
China's housing prices have been growing nearly twice as fast as national income in the past decade despite (1) a phenomenal rate of return to capital and (2) an alarmingly high vacancy rate. This paper interprets such a prolonged paradoxical housing boom as a rational bubble that emerges naturally from China's large-scale economic transition, featuring an exceptionally high rate of return to capital driven by massive resource reallocation. Because such primarily resource-reallocation-driven high capital returns are not sustainable in the long run, expectations of high future demand for ...
Journal Article
Mapping Our Community: Residential Segregation in Mt. Airy and in Philadelphia
The West Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia has been nationally recognized for its efforts to intentionally promote racial integration and neighborhood stability since the 1950s.1 In the more than 50 years since then, residents understand the challenges to integration through a new lens and remain passionate about creating a neighborhood of diversity and inclusion. A contemporary challenge to racial integration in Mt. Airy focuses on the concern that rising housing costs will lead to the displacement of current residents and will inhibit lower-income residents from moving into the ...
Report
Accounting for breakout in Britain: The Industrial Revolution through a Malthusian lens
This paper develops a simple dynamic model to examine the breakout from a Malthusian economy to a modern growth regime. It identifies several factors that determine the fastest rate at which the population can grow without engendering declining living standards; this is termed maximum sustainable population growth. We then apply the framework to Britain and find a dramatic increase in sustainable population growth at the time of the Industrial Revolution, well before the beginning of modern levels of income growth. The main contributions to the British breakout were technological improvements ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Fertility on Mothers’ Labor Supply over the Last Two Centuries
This paper documents the evolving impact of childbearing on the work activity of mothers. Based on a compiled dataset of 441 censuses and surveys between 1787 and 2015, representing 103 countries and 48.4 million mothers, we document three main findings: (1) the effect of fertility on labor supply is small and typically indistinguishable from zero at low levels of development and economically large and negative at higher levels of development; (2) this negative gradient is remarkably consistent across histories of currently developed countries and contemporary cross-sections of countries; and ...
Report
Small firms’ formalization: the stick treatment
Firm informality is pervasive throughout the developing world, and Bangladesh is no exception. The informal status of many firms substantially reduces the tax basis and therefore affects the provision of public goods. The literature on encouraging formalization has focused predominantly on reducing the direct costs of formalization and has found negligible effects from such policies. In this paper, we focus on a stick intervention, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first in a developing-country setting to deal with the most direct and dominant form of informality: the lack of ...
Report
Lights, camera,...income! Estimating poverty using national accounts, survey means, and lights
In this paper, we try to understand whether measures of GDP per capita taken from national accounts or measures of mean income or consumption derived from household surveys better proxy for true income per capita. We propose a data-driven method to assess the relative quality of GDP per capita versus survey means by comparing the evolution of each series to the evolution of satellite-recorded nighttime lights. Our main assumption, which is robust to a variety of specification checks, is that the measurement error in nighttime lights is unrelated to the measurement errors in either national ...
Speech
Investing in America’s Workforce
Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker spoke at the Fed?s Investing in America?s Workforce conference in Austin, TX. His presentation covered the findings of a new Fed report on workforce development.
Journal Article
Resident Engagement: Effective Strategies for Community Building
Community-building initiatives bring together a number of stakeholders to set goals and implement activities to revitalize neighborhoods. As part of this process, organizations seek ways to incorporate resident input and increase resident engagement. Intermediaries and technical assistance organizations such as the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) provide strategies and best practices to solicit resident ideas and to encourage residents to participate in the process of building a community. According to the LISC Institute for Comprehensive Community Development, ?The work of ...