Research notes
Published papers on trade, finance, migration and knowledge whose replication data sits in a public archive. Each note states the question the authors asked, what they found, and what this platform's own data can add to it — including, where it applies, that it can add nothing.
Why do central banks hold so many dollars, and what are they insuring against?
Mitali Das et al. (2026) · IMF Working Paper
Das, Gopinath, Hall, Kim and Stein document across 56 countries that central bank dollar reserve holdings correlate with how much the domestic corporate...
FinanceWhat happens to a country's creditworthiness when some of its debts are secret?
Laura Alfaro, Fabio Kanczuk (2023) · AEA Papers and Proceedings 112
Alfaro and Kanczuk address the rise of non-Paris Club lending, notably from China, to low- and middle-income countries. Unlike traditional sovereign debt...
FinanceDo foreign-owned firms report less profit than identical domestic ones?
Katarzyna Anna Bilicka (2019) · American Economic Review 109(8)
Bilicka uses confidential UK corporate tax return data and finds foreign multinational subsidiaries report taxable profits relative to assets at half the...
FinanceDo capital flows around the world move to their own rhythm, or to one set in Washington?
Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, Hélène Rey (2020) · AEA Papers and Proceedings 110
Miranda-Agrippino and Rey document the Global Financial Cycle: risky asset prices, intermediary leverage, credit growth and gross capital flows across the...
FinanceWho ends up paying when a bank's foreign income is taxed twice?
Harry Huizinga, Johannes Voget, Wolf Wagner (2014) · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 6(2)
Huizinga, Voget and Wagner examine banks across 38 countries from 1998 to 2008. International double taxation of foreign-source bank income reduces...
FinanceWhy is it so hard for a middle-income country to tax the multinationals operating inside it?
Sebastián Bustos et al. (2019) · AEA Papers and Proceedings 109
Bustos, Pomeranz, Vila-Belda and Zucman use Chile as a case study of a general problem. Multinationals account for a large share of Chilean GDP yet report...
FinanceDo firms shade the prices on their own invoices to move profit across a border?
Anca D. Cristea, Daniel X. Nguyen (2016) · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 8(3)
Cristea and Nguyen use Danish export transactions from 1999 to 2006, identifying from the moment a firm acquires a foreign affiliate and from changes in...
FinanceIf profits are booked in the wrong country, which national statistics are wrong?
Fatih Guvenen et al. (2022) · American Economic Review
Guvenen, Mataloni, Rassier and Ruhl show that profit shifting does not merely move tax revenue — it corrupts headline measures of the US economy. From 1982...
FinanceCan receiving too much foreign capital make a rich country grow more slowly?
Gianluca Benigno, Luca Fornaro, Martin Wolf (2024) · Journal of Political Economy
Benigno, Fornaro and Wolf connect two facts about the United States since the late 1990s: large capital inflows from developing countries, the so-called...
FinanceWhy do careful estimates of profit shifting differ by an order of magnitude?
Dhammika Dharmapala (2019) · AEA Papers and Proceedings 109
Dharmapala reviews the measurement of profit shifting and finds the divergence between microeconomic estimates from firm data and macroeconomic estimates...
FinanceDo taxes push foreign investment away, and does it depend on what the investment is for?
Nils Herger (2016) · International Tax and Public Finance
Herger decomposes cross-border mergers — the dominant form of FDI — into horizontal and vertical strategies over 1999 to 2010, and finds the tax effect is...
FinanceIf a firm books a sale in a tax haven while the goods are sold somewhere else, what does that look like in the statistics?
Sébastien Laffitte, Farid Toubal (2022) · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
Laffitte and Toubal show that US multinationals record sales, and the profit on those sales, in tax havens while the goods and services are physically sold...
KnowledgeCan a migrant community move an entire industry's technology across an ocean?
Nina Boberg-Fazlić, Paul Sharp (2023) · American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 15(3)
Boberg-Fazlić and Sharp study nineteenth-century Danish-American settlements and the US dairy industry. Denmark had developed distinctive dairy techniques,...
KnowledgeIf information is free, does it still matter how far away your customer is?
Anders Akerman, Edwin Leuven, Magne Mogstad (2021) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 14(1)
Akerman, Leuven and Mogstad use a Norwegian public programme that rolled out broadband access points at different times in different places, giving...
KnowledgeHow much of a country's invention is done by people born somewhere else?
Francesco Lissoni, Ernest Miguélez (2024) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 38(1)
Lissoni and Miguélez review what patent and inventor records reveal about migrants and invention. Linking inventors on patents to their origins shows...
KnowledgeDoes the arrival of migrants make the places they settle more inventive?
Konrad Burchardi et al. (2026) · American Economic Review
Burchardi, Chaney, Hassan, Tarquinio and Terry build an identification strategy from the interaction between quasi-random variation in the ancestry...
KnowledgeDoes patenting a discovery stop other people building on it?
Bhaven Sampat, Heidi L. Williams (2019) · American Economic Review 109(1)
Sampat and Williams compare human gene sequences that were patented against near-identical sequences whose applications failed, using administrative records...
KnowledgeDo the friendships between two places predict how much they trade?
Michael Bailey et al. (2018) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 32(3)
Bailey, Cao, Kuchler, Stroebel and Wong introduce a measure of social connectedness built from aggregated, anonymised Facebook friendship links between...
KnowledgeWhen cheap imports arrive, do domestic firms innovate their way out or give up?
David Autor et al. (2020) · American Economic Review: Insights 2(3)
Matching three decades of US patents to the firms that own them, Autor, Dorn, Hanson, Pisano and Shu find that rising import exposure from China reduced...
KnowledgeIf a government subsidises research, do firms do more of it — or just claim more?
Antoine Dechezleprêtre et al. (2024) · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 15(4)
Dechezleprêtre, Einiö, Martin and Nguyen exploit a change in the asset-based size thresholds determining eligibility for UK R&D tax relief, giving a...
KnowledgeHow does an idea invented in one country end up producing goods in another?
Ana Maria Santacreu, Jie Cai, Nan Li (2021) · American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 13(4)
Santacreu, Cai and Li model knowledge diffusion across countries and sectors, treating technology as something that spreads unevenly rather than as a...
KnowledgeRich countries spend more on research every year. Why is measured productivity growth falling?
Ian Goldin et al. (2024) · Journal of Economic Literature 62(1)
The review by Goldin, Koutroumpis, Lafond and Winkler documents a slowdown in productivity growth across advanced economies despite rising research inputs,...
KnowledgeDoes forcing a foreign firm to share its technology actually transfer any?
Panle Jia Barwick et al. (2025) · Review of Economic Studies
Barwick, Cao, Li and Bai study China's joint-venture requirement in automobiles, under which foreign carmakers had to partner with domestic firms as the...
KnowledgeWhen shipping technology changes, who does it make rich?
Luigi Pascali (2017) · American Economic Review 107(9)
Pascali uses the transition from sail to steam in the nineteenth century as a natural experiment: steamships made trade routes independent of prevailing...
KnowledgeHow much of what gets patented rests on publicly funded science?
Matt Marx (2019) · Strategic Management Journal
Marx builds a comprehensive linkage between patents and the scientific articles they cite, a mapping that had not existed at scale. The reason it matters is...
MigrationDoes money earned abroad build anything lasting at home?
Gaurav Khanna et al. (2026) · Review of Economic Studies
Khanna, Murathanoglu, Theoharides and Yang use the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which moved exchange rates differently for Philippine provinces depending on...
MigrationWhat happens when the arrivals are near-perfect substitutes for the workers already there?
Sebastian Braun, Toman Omar Mahmoud (2014) · Journal of Economic History 74(1)
Braun and Mahmoud use the same expellee episode for a different question. Because expellees were ethnic Germans, not selected on skills or job prospects,...
MigrationIf you shut a border to protect domestic workers, do their wages actually rise?
Michael A. Clemens, Ethan G. Lewis, Hannah M. Postel (2018) · American Economic Review 108(6)
Clemens, Lewis and Postel study the 1964 exclusion of nearly half a million Mexican bracero farm workers from the United States, a policy explicitly...
MigrationIf firms cannot hire foreign workers for low-skill jobs, do they hire local ones instead?
Michael A. Clemens, Ethan G. Lewis (2026) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
Clemens and Lewis exploit the randomised lottery that allocates part of the US H-2B visa quota — as clean an experiment as this literature gets. Firms that...
MigrationHow long does a labour market take to absorb a very large, sudden arrival?
Sebastian Till Braun, Henning Weber (2021) · Journal of International Economics
Braun and Weber study the arrival of eight million German expellees in West Germany after 1945, distributed very unevenly between regions. Fitting a dynamic...
MigrationDoes money sent home protect households from bad years, or add another source of instability?
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Susan Pozo (2011) · American Economic Review 101(3)
Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo examine Mexican household data from 2000 to 2008, correcting for the reverse causality that makes this hard — households in trouble...
MigrationDo people who flee do as well in a new labour market as people who choose to move?
Courtney Brell, Christian Dustmann, Ian Preston (2020) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 34(1)
Brell, Dustmann and Preston survey refugee labour-market outcomes across high-income countries and find refugees do persistently worse than economic...
MigrationWhen seven million people arrive at once, who gains and who loses?
Lorenzo Caliendo et al. (2023) · AEA Papers and Proceedings
Caliendo, Opromolla, Parro and Sforza treat the arrival of more than seven million Ukrainian refugees after the 2022 invasion as an exogenous,...
MigrationWhy has the wage gap between immigrants and natives widened for each successive arrival cohort?
Christoph Albert, Albrecht Glitz, Joan Llull (2026) · American Economic Review
Albert, Glitz and Llull show that immigrant wage assimilation depends not only on individual skill accumulation but on labour market equilibrium. When...
MigrationDoes a hotter year send people abroad, and does it matter whether they have relatives already there?
Ana María Ibáñez et al. (2026) · Journal of Development Economics
Ibáñez, Quigua, Romero and Velásquez show that exposure to extreme temperatures raises international migration from El Salvador. The chain is specific: heat...
MigrationHow much of what migrants send home does anybody actually observe?
Giuseppe De Arcangelis et al. (2022) · Journal of Development Economics
De Arcangelis, Fertig, Liang, Srouji and Yang tackle the measurement problem directly, comparing survey responses against administrative records and a...
MigrationIf cities pay so much more, why do so few people move to them?
Travis Baseler (2023) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 15(4)
Baseler runs two field experiments in Kenya and finds part of the answer is that rural households do not know how much migrants earn. Parents underestimate...
regionsWhen jobs appear in one place, who actually gets them?
Ferdinando Monte, Stephen J. Redding, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg (2018) · American Economic Review 108(12)
Monte, Redding and Rossi-Hansberg show that how much local employment responds to a local labour demand shock depends on how open that place is to...
regionsBeing near other firms helps — but how near is near enough?
Stuart S. Rosenthal, William C. Strange (2020) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 34(3)
Rosenthal and Strange review the evidence on how agglomeration benefits attenuate with distance. The effects operate at several spatial scales at once —...
regionsWhy have big cities pulled away from everywhere else since the 1990s?
Jan Eeckhout, Christoph Hedtrich, Roberto Pinheiro (2025) · American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
Eeckhout, Hedtrich and Pinheiro identify differential information technology investment as a key driver of job and wage polarisation across cities. Firms in...
regionsCan a government close a regional gap by directing land to poorer places?
Min Fang (2026) · Working paper
Fang studies a major Chinese land policy that allocated more urban land quota to underdeveloped inland regions in order to narrow regional development gaps....
regionsDo the best firms make cities productive, or do productive cities attract the best firms?
Cecile Gaubert (2018) · American Economic Review 108(11)
Gaubert builds a theory of where heterogeneous firms locate across cities and sectors. In equilibrium the distribution of city sizes and the sorting of...
TradeWhen a poor country gains access to a rich market, do its workers move into better jobs?
Brian McCaig, Nina Pavcnik (2018) · American Economic Review 108(7)
McCaig and Pavcnik study the 2001 US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement, which sharply cut US tariffs on Vietnamese goods. They find the share of Vietnamese...
TradeAs a country gets deeper into global supply chains, does it capture more of the value or less?
Hiau Looi Kee, Heiwai Tang (2016) · American Economic Review 106(6)
The expectation is that joining supply chains means assembling other people's components, so domestic content falls. Kee and Tang show China went the other...
TradeDoes trading more make a country richer, or do rich countries simply trade more?
James Feyrer (2019) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11(4)
Feyrer revisits one of the hardest questions in the field. Frankel and Romer used geography as an instrument for trade and found a positive effect on...
TradeWhen a tariff changes, how long does trade take to respond — and does the usual estimate capture it?
Christoph Boehm, Andrei Levchenko, Nitya Pandalai-Nayar (2023) · American Economic Review 113(4)
Boehm, Levchenko and Pandalai-Nayar exploit an overlooked source of clean variation: when a country changes its Most Favoured Nation tariff, partners...
TradeHow much of a manufactured good is made outside the country that sells it?
Marcel P. Timmer et al. (2014) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 28(2)
Timmer and co-authors decompose final manufacturing goods into all the labour and capital used to make them, wherever it sat, using the World Input-Output...
TradeHow much is a trade agreement worth even when it does not cut a single tariff?
Kyle Handley, Nuno Limão (2017) · American Economic Review 107(9)
Handley and Limão argue that agreements have value by removing the threat of future protection, which changes whether firms invest in entering a market at...
TradeWho actually paid for the 2018 US tariffs, and what did they do to the pattern of trade?
Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, David E. Weinstein (2019) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 33(4)
Amiti, Redding and Weinstein find that the 2018 tariffs were passed through almost completely into the prices US importers paid: the cost fell on US firms...
TradeWhen two countries trade with each other and neither is the United States, whose currency is the price in?
Gita Gopinath et al. (2020) · American Economic Review 110(3)
Gopinath and co-authors propose a dominant currency paradigm: most trade is invoiced in dollars regardless of who is buying and selling, prices are sticky...
TradeWhen a country exports more, is it more firms exporting or the same firms exporting more?
Ana M. Fernandes et al. (2023) · Journal of International Economics
The answer decides which trade model is right and how large the gains from trade are. Krugman's benchmark puts all variation on the intensive margin —...
TradeWhat makes a country reach for a tariff when it has promised not to?
Chad P. Bown, Meredith A. Crowley (2013) · American Economic Review 103(2)
Bagwell and Staiger's theory of cooperative trade agreements predicts that new protection rises with imports, rises when import demand and export supply are...
TradeWhen a country exports, how much of the value was actually made there — and how far does the usual export statistic mislead us?
Robert C. Johnson (2014) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 28(2)
Johnson shows that because production is split across supply chains, gross exports overstate what a country actually contributes. He puts the gap between...
TradeWhat is a day of shipping time worth?
David L. Hummels, Georg Schaur (2013) · American Economic Review 103(7)
Hummels and Schaur model the exporter's choice between fast expensive air freight and slow cheap ocean freight, and use US import data to back out what...
TradeWhen two large economies tax each other's goods, who else gains?
Pablo Fajgelbaum et al. (2024) · American Economic Review: Insights 6(2)
Fajgelbaum, Goldberg, Kennedy, Khandelwal and Taglioni find the US-China trade war created net export opportunities rather than merely diverting existing...
Where a note says the data is behind a login, that is openICPSR, which refuses non-browser requests. Those notes rest on the published abstract and on our own observations, never on files we could not open.