In the Antebellum United States, “free soil” areas had greater economic development than the areas where slavery was legal, yet free farming did not displace slave-based agriculture in the slave states. Was free soil a “magic dirt,” or could free farms compete in the slavery-legal region? We consider three classes of tests. First, we construct, separately for the two regions, suitability indices using soil and climate endowments. The indices suggest free-soil techniques could have prospered in the Upper South.

Hard discount stores (HDS) have changed the dynamics of the traditional retail sector by selling a basket of products at very low prices. This business model has gained significant market shares in many countries, but little is known about its impact on the labor market. To fill this gap in the literature, we study the impact of the entry of hard discounters on local labor markets in Colombia.

This article presents a theory of lifetime welfare, considering the corresponding cycles, trends, and span. The model suggests that economic agents should focus more on smoothing the mean welfare of individuals than on smoothing their consumption and their income, since they are not the same. Given that private and public decisions can generate internalities and externalities, and thus, inefficiencies, these results can justify individual, social, and Government interventions, for example in lifestyle, and the education, health, pension, and insurance markets.

Looking for jobs is complicated and frustrating. We present the results of a randomised multi-treatment intervention offering jobseekers access to online tools aimed to improve the effectiveness of their job search. In one treatment arm, jobseekers have access to a purposely designed online job search platform that recommends vacancies by proximity with the jobseeker’s skill profile (Jobs-for-You, J4U ). The second treatment consists of online cognitive training sessions that help maintain crucial skills during unemployment (Cognition, COG).

We study the medium- and long-term effects of Venezuela’s 2009 ban on imports from Colombia on Colombian manufacturing firms. Using a synthetic control design, we first document a significant targeted reduction in Venezuelan imports from Colombia between 2009 and 2013. We then leverage microdata from customs transactions and the manufacturing census to compare the performance of firms with varying exposure to the trade war—as determined by the proportion of their previous exports destined to Venezuela.

Economists are not well-known for agreeing with each other, but in the 1960s an unusual consensus emerged around anti-poverty programs in the United States. Utilitarians and Austrians joined Post Keynesian, feminist, and institutionalist economists to speak in one voice about the benefits of a negative income tax (NIT). Several economists won the attention of Sargent Shriver, the leader of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, and were given over 100 million dollars to experiment on America’s poor. What happened next should have become a champagne moment for experimental economics.

We analyze lifecycle saving using a recursive utility model calibrated to match estimates of the value of a statistical life. The novelty of our approach is that we require preferences to be monotone with respect to first-order stochastic dominance while disentangling risk aversion and the intertemporal elasticity of substitution. We show that, with a positive value of life, risk aversion reduces each of savings, stock market participation, and annuity purchase. Risk averse agents insure against early death by consuming more when young and retaining wealth for bequests.

What is the equilibrium effect of politicians’ wages in the presence of criminal groups, that use both bribes and violence? With a regression discontinuity design, we show that better-paid local politicians in Italy are significantly more likely to prevent corruption in public procurement, but are also more likely to be targeted by criminal attacks. The disciplining effect of wages, which subsides after three years, is driven by a change in incumbents' behavior rather than improved selection.