The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) serves as a hub for cutting-edge analysis and research across the entire University of Chicago economics community, uniting researchers from the Booth School of Business, the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, the...
Inspired by our namesakes, Nobel Laureates Gary Becker and Milton Friedman, who believed that economics research could help improve the world, BFI works with the Chicago Economics community to turn its evidence-based research into real-world impact.
The Predoctoral Research in Economics Program (PREP) is intended to serve as a bridge between college and graduate school for students interested in empirical economics. The program offers unique research and professional training opportunities at the University of Chicago.
Expanding Discovery in Economics+ (EDE+) brings together a diverse group of early undergraduate students to hone their research abilities and technical skills.
Cevat Giray Aksoy, Nicholas Bloom, Steven Davis, Victoria Marino, and Cem Özgüzel
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 accessing groups with traditionally lower...
We examine the causal effect of health insurance on mortality using the universe of low-income adults, a dataset of 37 million individuals identified by linking the 2010 Census to administrative tax data. Our methodology leverages state-level variation in the timing...
Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Virginia Minni, and Luigi Zingales
We evaluate a firm’s unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm’s “Discover Your Purpose” intervention among 2,976 white-collar...
Captivating and informative videos on the latest insights and trends as well as the tested stock of knowledge in economics from leaders in academia, policy, business, and the media.
We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the parameters of the model using US Census micro data on firm-level output, R&D and patenting. The model provides a good fit to the dynamics of firm entry and exit, output and R&D. Taxing the continued operation of incumbents can lead to sizable gains (of the order of 1.4% improvement in welfare) by encouraging exit of less productive firms and freeing up skilled labor to be used for R&D by high-type incumbents. Subsidies to the R&D of incumbents do not achieve this objective because they encourage the survival and expansion of low-type firms.
The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) serves as a hub for cutting-edge analysis and research across the entire University of Chicago economics community, uniting researchers from the Booth School of Business, the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, the...
Inspired by our namesakes, Nobel Laureates Gary Becker and Milton Friedman, who believed that economics research could help improve the world, BFI works with the Chicago Economics community to turn its evidence-based research into real-world impact.
The Predoctoral Research in Economics Program (PREP) is intended to serve as a bridge between college and graduate school for students interested in empirical economics. The program offers unique research and professional training opportunities at the University of Chicago.
Expanding Discovery in Economics+ (EDE+) brings together a diverse group of early undergraduate students to hone their research abilities and technical skills.
Cevat Giray Aksoy, Nicholas Bloom, Steven Davis, Victoria Marino, and Cem Özgüzel
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 accessing groups with traditionally lower...
We examine the causal effect of health insurance on mortality using the universe of low-income adults, a dataset of 37 million individuals identified by linking the 2010 Census to administrative tax data. Our methodology leverages state-level variation in the timing...
Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Virginia Minni, and Luigi Zingales
We evaluate a firm’s unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm’s “Discover Your Purpose” intervention among 2,976 white-collar...
Captivating and informative videos on the latest insights and trends as well as the tested stock of knowledge in economics from leaders in academia, policy, business, and the media.
