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Journal Article
Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Transformative Potential and Associated Risks
Financial services in the crypto finance world are provided by a combination of centralized finance (CeFi) organizations and decentralized finance (DeFi). CeFi's are roughly similar to traditional financial intermediaries, but DeFi seeks to provide services using smart contracts (computer code) rather than an intermediary. DeFi's unusual structure creates some interesting potential but also raises new risks in addition to those already inherent in blockchains and crypto finance. This paper reviews some of the opportunities and risks.
Report
Working Remotely? Selection, Treatment, and the Market for Remote Work
How does remote work affect productivity and how productive are workers who choose remote jobs? We estimate both effects in a U.S. Fortune 500 firm’s call centers that employed both remote and on-site workers in the same jobs. Prior to COVID-19, remote workers answered 12 percent fewer calls per hour than on-site workers. When the call centers closed due to COVID-19, the productivity of formerly on-site workers declined by 4 percent relative to already-remote workers, indicating that a third of the initial gap was due to a negative treatment effect of remote work. Yet an 8 percent ...
Working Paper
Measuring Trends in Work From Home: Evidence from Six U.S. Datasets
This paper documents the prevalence of work from home (WFH) in six U.S. data sets. These surveys measure WFH using different questions, reference periods, samples, and survey collection methods. Once we construct samples and WFH measures that are comparable across surveys, all surveys broadly agree about the trajectory of aggregate WFH since the Covid-19 outbreak. The most important source of disagreement in the level of WFH across surveys is in WFH by self-employed workers; by contrast, surveys closely agree on rates of WFH among employees. All surveys agree that in 2024 WFH remains ...
Working Paper
Financial Crises and the Global Supply Network: Evidence from Multinational Enterprises
This paper empirically examines the effects of financial crises on the organization of production of multinational enterprises. We construct a panel of European multinational networks from 2003 through 2015. We use as a financial shock the increase in risk premia between August 2007 and July 2012 and build a multinational-specific shock based on the network structure before the shock. Multinationals facing a larger financial shock perform worse in terms of revenue, employment, and growth in the number of affiliates. Lower growth in the number of affiliates operates through a negative effect ...
Working Paper
Heterogeneity in Work From Home: Evidence from Six U.S. Datasets
This paper documents heterogeneity in work from home (WFH) across six U.S. data sets. These surveys agree that pre-pandemic differences in WFH rates by sex, education, and state of residence expanded following the Covid-19 outbreak. The surveys also show similar post-pandemic trends in WFH by firm size and industry. We show that an industry's WFH potential was highly correlated with actual WFH during the first year or two of the Covid-19 pandemic, but that this correlation was much weaker before and after the pandemic, suggesting that WFH potential is a necessary but not sufficient ...
Working Paper
What makes a job better? Survey evidence from job changers
Changes in pay and benefits alone incorrectly predict self-assessed changes in overall job quality 30 percent of the time, according to survey evidence from job changers. Job changers also place more emphasis on their interest in their work than they do on pay and benefits in evaluating whether their new job is better. Parents particularly emphasize work-life balance, and we find some indications that mothers value it more than fathers. Improvements in pay are highly correlated with improvements in other amenities for workers with less education but not for workers with a bachelor's degree or ...
Working Paper
Measuring Trends in Work From Home: Evidence from Six U.S. Datasets
This paper documents the prevalence of work from home (WFH) in six U.S. data sets. These surveys measure WFH using different questions, reference periods, samples, and survey collection methods. Once we construct samples and WFH measures that are comparable across surveys, all surveys broadly agree about the trajectory of aggregate WFH since the Covid-19 outbreak. The surveys agree that pre-pandemic differences in WFH rates by sex, education, and state of residence expanded following the Covid-19 outbreak. The surveys also show similar post-pandemic trends in WFH by firm size and industry. ...
Working Paper
Limited enforcement and the organization of production
This paper describes a dynamic, general equilibrium model designed to assess whether contractual imperfections in the form of limited enforcement can account for international differences in the organization of production. In the model, limited enforcement constrains agents to operate establishments below their optimal scale. As a result, economies where contracts are enforced more efficiently tend to be richer and emphasize large scale production. Calibrated simulations of the model reveal that these effects can be large and account for a sizeable part of the observed differences in the size ...