Title: You Only Weave Twice: Industrial Espionage and Economic Growth in XIX Century France

Can state-sponsored industrial espionage promote innovation and lead to self-sustained growth? We study the effect of 18th century French industrial espionage activity on French innovation and industrial activity in the XIX century. Between 1730 and 1800 the French Bureau of Commerce promoted an ambitious plan aimed at stealing from Britain the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution, bribing British entrepreneurs and inventors to leave England and bring their expertise to France. We assemble a novel database with a comprehensive list of French espionage activity between 1730-1800 and combine it with newly-digitized 17th 18th century industrial surveys, 1800s industrial censuses, and the full list of early French patents. We find large, positive, and persistent effects of industrial espionage on industrial activity and innovation.

This paper is joint with Julian Langer (UZH) and Raffaele Blasone (LSE).

Title: Design-Robust Two-Way-Fixed-Effects Regression For Panel Data (paper) 

Title: Making the invisible hand visible: Managers and the allocation of workers to jobs

Abstract: Why do managers matter for firm performance? This paper provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational firm. The data covers 200,000 white-collar workers and 30,000 managers over 10 years in 100 countries. I identify good managers as the top 30% by their speed of promotion and leverage exogenous variation induced by the rotation of managers across teams. I find that good managers cause workers to reallocate within the firm through lateral and vertical transfers. This leads to large and persistent gains in workers' career progression and productivity. Seven years after the manager transition, workers earn 30% more and perform better on objective performance measures. In terms of aggregate firm productivity, doubling the share of good managers would increase output per worker by 61% at the establishment level. My results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers' specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers' time at the firm.

Paper is here: https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/eopp/eopp72.pdf

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Title: Measuring Inequality with Consumption Time.

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Title: Right-to-Counsel and rental housing markets: quasi-experimental evidence from New York

Title: Personalized Pricing and Competition (joint with Jidong Zhou).

Simon is going to give a talk on the following: "What do we think an economist should know? A Machine Learning investigation of research and intermediate-level textbooks" which is a joint paper with Sam Bowles, Wendy Carlin, and Sahana Subramanyam Link here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3kfmbr6w6s30z0sax3ch5/What_do_we_think_bchs_2023.09.pdf?rlkey=ft35knde0oqnv6zhits2uo1z1&dl=0

Title: Capital Embodied Structural Change

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Hosted by Herakles Polemarchakis

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