The Internet has dramatically increased the amount of information available to both job seekers and employers. Economists and labor market experts have predicted that this would change the way people find jobs. It is now time to compare these predictions with people’s actual behavior. Has the matching between workers and employers become easier? And does the Internet facilitate the transition out of unemployment in the same way as it facilitates the move to a new job by the currently employed?
Read Report

The advent of the Internet over the last decade has meant radical changes for retail trading for many goods markets. What are the implications for the future of retail trade? When goods may be of different quality, which are sold through the Internet and which in standard "brick and mortar" shops? Does Internet trading rely on the role of intermediaries who certify the quality of goods to buyers?
Read Report

At least once in a lifetime, we all face decisions about our occupations. Some prefer to work for established companies, while others prefer to establish their own venture. What dictates this choice? Which individual characteristics define entrepreneurs? To what degree do the economic environment and university education affect the rate of entrepreneurial activity? Have these factors changed over the last few decades?
Read Report

A spinoff is a firm created by one or more employees who break away from their previous employer. Spinoffs have played a major role in the evolution of many innovative industries, from automobiles to computers, and they tend to exhibit strong empirical regularities. How can an industry’s rate of spinoffs be explained? How likely are spinoffs to be successful? Should public policy encourage the formation of new firms via spinoffs or should it discourage it?
Read Report

Internet trading platforms like eBay have become hugely popular. Since transactions occur between distant people who do not know each other, these platforms have chosen to rely on reputation-building mechanisms to create a sufficient degree of mutual trust to make users comfortable with anonymous trading. Such feedback mechanism allows users to rate other users they have traded with. Does this system work? Can it be improved?
Read Report

University of Chicago Professor Luigi Zingales answered readers' questions on how advances in information technology are transforming firms’ physical boundaries and the nature of knowledge-based industries, and on the implications for corporate strategy and industry policy.

In the last half of the twentieth century industrialized countries experienced a transition to service economies. What is the explanation for the rapid increase in the share of services on total output? Why have some services, such as health care, enjoyed a huge expansion, while others, such as milk delivery, disappeared altogether? And what is the link between the rise of services and an increasingly well educated and wealthier population?
Read Report

Governments often try to shape firms’ investments in research and development (R&D) by providing subsidies. A major example is the 1983 US Orphan Drug Act (ODA), granting pharmaceutical firms significant tax benefits if they invested in drugs for extremely rare diseases that nobody had previously cured. Did the government obtain the result it expected? How effective are public subsidies for R&D?
Read Report

Some believe that declining civilizations are characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity. The starting point of this paper, though, is the positive aspect of standardization, the one that allows coordination and compatibility. Clients of a particular bank, for instance, can use their ATM cards in a competing bank thanks to standardized technology. Some of the prevailing standards are decided by organizations set up for this purpose: how do these standard-setting organizations work?
Read Report

Online sales in the United States have a tax advantage compared to traditional retail sales, since state sales taxes may be avoided by buying online from out-of-state vendors. How important is this in determining online demand? What are the other important issues in determining consumers’ choice between online and brick-and-mortar stores? Will Internet vendors eventually come to dominate sales?
Read Report