Publications

POID Working Paper

Remote work, employee mix, and performance

We study the shift to fully remote work at a large call center in Turkey, highlighting three findings. First, fully remote work increased the share of women, including married women, rural and smaller-town residents. By ...Read more...

POID Working Paper

The new geography of labor markets

We use matched employer-employee data to study where Americans live in relation to employer worksites. Mean distance from employee home to employer worksite rose from 15 miles in 2019 to 26 miles in 2023. Twelve percent ...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Rationalizing firm forecasts

We partner with a large US payment-processing company to run a 5-year, 10 wave panel survey of incentivized quarterly sales forecasts on over 6,000 firms. We match firm predictions to proprietary revenue data to assess a...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Distributional consumer price indices

This paper develops a new public database to estimate inflation heterogeneity across socio-demographic groups in the United States in real time. These distributional CPIs (D-CPIs) are fully consistent with the methodolog...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Conversations at scale: robust AI-led interviews with simple open-source platform

The advent of large language models (LLMs) provides an opportunity to conduct qualitative interviews at a large scale, with thousands of respondents, creating a bridge between qualitative and quantitative methods. In thi...Read more...

POID Working Paper

The new digital divide

We build and analyze new metrics of digital usage that leverage telemetry data collected by Microsoft during operating system updates across forty million Windows devices in U.S. households. These measures of US househol...Read more...

POID Working Paper

The Cybernetic Teammate: a field experiment on generative AI reshaping teamwork and expertise

We examine how artificial intelligence transforms the core pillars of collaboration - performance, expertise sharing, and social engagement - through a pre-registered field experiment with 776 professionals at Procter & ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Fully remote work expands recruitment and boosts productivity

The Covid-19 pandemic sparked a large and lasting shift to remote work. This column draws on detailed administrative data from a major call centre in Turkiye to show that a permanent shift to fully remote work can expand...Read more...

Blog

LSE Europp:

Cultural exception? Why regulating the book market contradicts conventional wisdom about competition

Fixing retail book prices is a common policy in Europe, but how does preventing competition affect booksellers and buyers? Christos Genakos, Lorien Sabatino and Tommaso Valletti find that when the ability to offer custom...Read more...

Blog

Competition Policy International:

Competition-Friendly Industrial Policy

Industrial policy, essential for addressing market failures, encounters concerns regarding protecting inefficient firms. We advocate for competition-friendly industrial policies, underscoring the complementary relationsh...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Management and firm dynamism

We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants and improve the performan...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Working from home boosted growth by expanding disability employment

Individuals with a disability have remarkably low employment rates compared to the rest of the population. This column examines whether the rapid rise in the ability to work from home post-pandemic has improved disabilit...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Polarized technologies

We document that inventors patent and cite technologies aligned with the views of their political party. We link inventors to U.S. voter registration data and map politically polarized issues to technologies. Compared to...Read more...

Blog

LSE USA PP:

How emigration shapes the diffusion of new technologies

The diffusion of new technologies across countries is a key driver of productivity growth and economic progress. Yet surprisingly, little is known about how technology moves across borders. Our research provides new evid...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Creative destruction through innovation bursts

In theories of creative destruction, product innovation is a key driver of aggregate growth. In this paper, we confront the predictions of these theories about product dynamics with empirical patterns in product-level da...Read more...

Blog

Imperial College Business School:

How protectionism risks undermining the US economy

Donald Trump's announcement of wide-ranging tariffs has threatened to upend the rules of global trade that have been in place for decades, impacting supply chains and businesses across the world. The US President's pla...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

Communication Within Firms: Evidence from CEO Turnovers

This paper uses novel, firm-level communication measures derived from communications metadata several months before and after a CEO transition for 102 firms to study whether and how this organizational event is reflected...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

How emigration shapes the diffusion of new technologies

A central driver of economic growth is new technology. Gaia Dossi and Davide Coluccia show how migrants from Britain to the US in the late 19th and early 20th century not only brought new ideas with them but helped US in...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Inflation on Wall Street versus Main Street

Since 2021, developed countries have experienced a significant inflation episode. This column uses Decision Maker Panel data from UK CEOs and CFOs to study firms' inflation perceptions and expectations around monthly off...Read more...

CEP report

Innovation through crises in the 2020s: survey evidence on digital, AI and net zero innovation in UK firms

In this policy brief, we present new data from a survey of 373 UK firms conducted in May 2024 in partnership with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). This is a follow-up to our two earlier surveys which revealed...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Emissions-adjusted total factor productivity

Traditional estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) measure the output that a bundle of inputs produces. But production comes with emissions that stay in the atmosphere for decades, which means that productivity doe...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Employer Screening and Optimal Unemployment Insurance

Field experiments show that employers are less likely to consider long-term unemployed job-seekers for interviews. We study the implications for optimal unemployment insurance (UI). Based on a structural model of job sea...Read more...

Blog

The ECB Blog:

AI can boost productivity - if firms use it

We constantly hear of exciting new ways AI tools can help to tackle economic problems and the productivity gains they bring. However, benefits can only materialize when firms actually use AI....Read more...

Blog

Bruegel:

Pitfalls to avoid as the EU ramps up defence investment

The European Union's push to rearm in the face of growing external threats and the increasing disengagement of the United States has, so far, been primarily a push to spend more on defence and to find ways to facilitate ...Read more...

Blog

MIT Sloan Management Review:

Reskilling the Workforce With AI: Harvard Business School's Raffaella Sadun (podcast)

Harvard Business School professor Raffaella Sadun's research has historically focused on digital reskilling. Now, rapid technological changes - like AI - are reshaping the nature of work. Raffaella's research has explore...Read more...