Nber Working Paper Series Regulatory Choice with Pollution and Innovation

Nber Working Paper Series International Innovation and Diffusion of Air Pollution Control Technologies: the Effects of Nox and So2 Regulation in the U.s., Japan, and Germany

Nber Working Paper Series Environment, Health, and Human Capital

In this review, we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well-being. First, in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior, particularly in the form of residential sorting, can lead to non-random assignment of pollution, economists have employed a wide range of quasi-experimental techniques to de...

Nber Working Paper Series Measuring Polarization in High-dimensional Data: Method and Application to Congressional Speech

We study trends in the partisanship of Congressional speech from 1873 to 2009. We define partisanship to be the ease with which an observer could infer a congressperson’s party from a fixed amount of speech, and we estimate it using a structural choice model and methods from machine learning. The estimates reveal that partisanship is far greater today than at any point in the past. Partisanship...

Nber Working Paper Series Innovation and Growth with Financial, and Other, Frictions

Wright thanks the Bank of Canada for their hospitality, as well as the NSF and the Ray Zemon Chair in Liquid Assets at the Wisconsin School of Business for support. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the position of the Bank of Canada, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Federal Reserve System, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circul...

Nber Working Paper Series the Effect of Pollution on Worker Productivity: Evidence from Call-center Workers in China

We investigate the effect of pollution on worker productivity in the service sector by focusing on two call centers in China. Using precise measures of each worker’s daily output linked to daily measures of pollution and meteorology, we find that higher levels of air pollution decrease worker productivity by reducing the number of calls that workers complete each day. These results manifest the...