This paper examines the global adoption of technology in the late nineteenth century. We construct several novel datasets to test the idea that the codification of technical knowledge in the vernacular was necessary for countries to absorb the technologies of the First Industrial Revolution. We find that comparative advantage shifted to industries that could benefit from these technologies in countries and colonies with access to codified technical knowledge, but not in other regions. Using the rapid and unprecedented codification of technical knowledge in Meiji Japan as a natural experiment, we show that this pattern emerged only after the Japanese government codified vast amounts of technical knowledge. Our findings shed new light on the frictions associated with technological diffusion and offer a novel explanation for why Meiji Japan was unique among non-Western countries in successfully industrializing during the first wave of globalization.

Motivated by recent concerns surrounding the use of third-party pricing algorithms by competing firms, we study repeated Bertrand competition where market demand or the cost of serving the market is observed by an intermediary (or “algorithm”) that selectively discloses demand or cost information to maximize firms’ collusive profit. We show that an upper censorship disclosure policy is optimal, which leads to price rigidity and supra-monopoly prices in some states. Improving the algorithm’s accuracy reduces expected consumer surplus whenever it does so under monopoly pricing. When the state is positively correlated over time, the algorithm discloses more information when recent demand was lower or costs were higher. The analysis extends to a generalized model that accommodates product differentiation and capacity constraints. We relate our findings to recent antitrust cases.

This paper develops a new framework for understanding when and how migrants shape culture, applying it to the Confederate diaspora—a small migrant group that left a large cultural imprint. Southern Whites that migrated after the Civil War played a pivotal role in spreading Confederate symbols and racial norms across the United States by the early 20th century. Their far-reaching influence stemmed from two key conditions: (i) an ideological intensity rooted in their experiences of slavery, secession, and military defeat, and (ii) access to malleable power structures during westward expansion and postwar reconciliation. These conditions enabled them to transmit Confederate culture to both kin and non-Southern neighbors and to expand their reach by mobilizing civil society organization and leveraging positions of authority. They shaped policies and institutions that helped entrench racial norms and inequalities in labor markets, housing, and the criminal justice system. Our findings provide empirical foundations for understanding how migrants can transform local culture, rather than merely assimilate.

International labor migration from developing to developed countries generates income gains for migrants that dwarf those from any known development intervention, with workers routinely experiencing 4–5-fold wage increases upon migration. These individual gains translate into massive remittance flows to developing countries that far exceed foreign aid flows. This review synthesizes the rapidly growing literature on migration's impacts on origin countries, emphasizing studies with credible causal identification. The evidence progresses from individual and household effects, where migrants and their families experience substantial gains in income, education investments, and consumption smoothing, to broader impacts on the origin area, including regional economic development and widespread human capital formation. Contrary to concerns about so-called brain drain, recent research reveals brain gain effects whereby migration opportunities increase educational investments and skill formation. Migration also has additional positive effects through trade and investment linkages, knowledge transfers, and changing social norms. This review also discusses policies for enhancing migration's development impacts and key areas for future research.

Testing for mediation suffers from low power near the origin. This can be addressed by augmenting the LR critical region as discussed in previous work within an asymptotic framework. In this paper we consider exact distributions of test statistics and use this to derive optimal augmentation regions for arbitrary sample sizes. The resulting test is very simple and reliable, making it relevant for empirical research, even with a very small number of observations. This new test is α-coherent, as required for the p-values, which are easily calculated for the new test. Simulations confirm robust power improvement and size control, even with non-normal errors.

This paper proposes the Regularized Generalized Covariance (RGCov) estimator, a ridge-type extension of the Generalized Covariance (GCov) estimator for high-dimensional stationary time series. By regularizing the GCov objective function, which involves the inverse of the covariance matrix, RGCov improves numerical stability while preserving positive definiteness. Under suitable conditions, the new estimator is consistent, asymptotically normal, and semiparametrically efficient. We also extend the GCov specification test and the nonlinear serial dependence (NLSD) test to their regularized versions, both of which are asymptotically Chi-square distributed. Simulation studies confirm the reliability of the RGCov and associated tests in high-dimensional settings. In the empirical application, RGCov is used to estimate a mixed causal-noncausal VAR for green energy stocks in the Renixx index and to construct two bubble-based investment strategies: bubble-riding and bubble-hedging, both of which outperform the benchmark index.

Can transport infrastructure expand long-term labour opportunities and weaken the occupational link between parents and children? We estimate the causal effect of railway access on occupational attainment and intergenerational mobility in nineteenth-century England and Wales. Exploiting the as-good-as-random opening of built and planned stations, we address endogeneity in rail proximity. Sons living 5 km closer to a station were more likely to leave farming for industrial and commercial jobs, often entering the top quartile of the occupational distribution. Railway access increased the probability of working in a different occupation than one’s father by 2% and of upward mobility by 6%.

Models of intertemporal choice typically assume that decision makers are impatient and often refer to the limited length of life as motivation for this assumption. Yet direct empirical evidence for the association between life expectancy and patience is scarce and restricted to variation in age. This paper documents distinct associations of patience with life expectancy and age. The analysis is based on data for 80,000 individuals in 76 countries and exploits variation in expected remaining years of life from period life tables. The empirical findings document that higher life expectancy is associated with a greater patience, conditional on age. Our findings also show that the association is unique to patience and does not pertain to other preferences, provide evidence for a hump-shaped age profile, document an association of patience with institutions in addition to life expectancy, hold conditional on country-cohort-specific variation in development, and provide indirect evidence for selective mortality influencing the life expectancy-patience nexus.