Research

Published papers (peer-reviewed)

1. The Cross-Sectional Implications of the Social Discount Rate  Econometrica, vol 91(6), pages 2065-2088, November, 2023.

2. Quantifying Racial Discrimination in the 1944 G.I. Bill Explorations in Economic History, vol 90, 101542, October 2023. Link to publication

3. Is Existential Risk Mitigation Uniquely Cost-Effective? Not in Standard Population Models. With Gustav Alexandrie. Forthcoming in Essays on Longtermism, edited by Jacob Barrett, Hilary Greaves and David Thorstad. Oxford University Press.

4. Time Inseparable Labor Productivity and the Workweek, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 123(3), pages 940-965, July 2021. (Let's Talk Development Blog)

5. Welfare Analysis with Heterogeneous Risk Preferences. Journal of Political Economy, vol 128(12), pages 4574-4613, December 2020. Online Appendix

6. Risk Sharing, Efficiency of Capital Allocation, and the Connection between Banks and the Real Economy. With Alessandro Barattieri and Dalibor Stevanovic. Journal of Corporate Finance, vol. 60, 101538 , February 2020.

7. Safe Assets as Commodity Money, with Benjamin Kay.  Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 51(6), pages 1651-1689, September 2019. (Bipartisan Policy Center: Financial Reform Must-Reads)

8. International Liquidity Rents. Review of Economic Dynamics, vol. 31, pages 147-159, January 2019.

9. Do Poor Countries Really Need More IT?, with Paul Gaggl. World Bank Economic Review, Volume 34, Issue 1, Pages 48–62, February 2020. (VOX)

10. Financial Sector Interconnectedness and Monetary Policy Transmission, with Alessandro Barattieri and Dalibor Stevanovic. Macroeconomic Dynamics, 23(3), pages 1074-110, April 2019.

11. On the Welfare Implications of Automation, with Paul Gaggl. Review of Economic Dynamics, vol. 29, pages 15-43, July 2018. (New York Times)

12. Misallocation and the Distribution of Global Volatility. American Economic Review, 107(2), 592-622, February, 2017. Online appendix

13. Transitioning from Low-Income Growth to High-Income Growth: Is There a Middle Income Trap? with David Bulman and Ha Nguyen. Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, 22(1), pp. 5-28, January, 2017.

14. Excessive Financing Costs in a Representative Agent Framework. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 8(2), pp. 215-237, April, 2016.

Working papers

• The Irrelevance of Intergenerational Altruism for Social Discounting

• The Long-Run Relationship Between Per Capita Incomes and Population Size, with Kevin Kuruc. CEPR working paper DP18353.

• Income Anonymity with Luis Mota Freitas.

• Aggregating Welfare Gains

• Capital Composition and the Declining Labor Share, with Paul Gaggl.

Policy

• Containment of the COVID-19 Pandemic in The Gambia, prepared as a background note for the World Bank's Economic Update for The Gambia, 2020.

• The Rate of Return to Government Investment in Cote d'Ivoire, prepared as a background note for the World Bank, Cote d'Ivoire Country Economic Memorandum, 2020.

• Is There Enough Redistribution? World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 8003, March 2017. Future Development blog

• Reconciling Micro- and Macro-Based Estimates of Technology Adoption Lags in a Model of Endogenous Technology adoption, with Ha Nguyen. Chapter 3 in Understanding the Latin America and the Caribbean's Income Gap, World Bank Report No. 97885-LAC, Edited by Jorge Thompson Araujo, Ekaterina Vostroknutova, Konstantin M. Wacker, and Mateo Clavijo, 2015.

• "Crowding In" and the Returns to Government Investment in Low-Income Countries, with Aart Kraay. The Economist

• Sovereign Defaults and Expropriations : Empirical Regularities, with Aart Kraay and Rong Qian, World Bank Working Paper 6218, 2012.

• Correcting Real Exchange Rate Misalignment: Conceptual and Practical Issues, with Ha Nguyen, World Bank Working Paper 6045, 2012.

• The Rate of Return on Savings and Investment in Constrained Firms, with Ha Nguyen.

• The Welfare Cost of Inflation and the Regulations of Money Substitutes, with Benjamin Eden.