The Digest

Falling labor shares and rising corporate profits have translated into higher corporate saving and turned the corporate sector from a net borrower to a net saver, while household saving has declined. Since 1980, the global corporate sector has increased its saving rate and switched from being a net borrower to being a net lender to the rest of the economy. This change has occurred in most industries and in a majority of countries. In The Global Rise of Corporate...

Startups that are awarded patents in a "quasi-random" way experience faster employment and sales growth than their counterparts with unsuccessful patent applications. Patent applications are assigned to examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on a quasi-random basis. The median examiner grants a patent to 61.5 percent of the applications he or she considers, but the percentage varies substantially across examiners. This creates a "patent lottery" of...

Single women were less likely to display high levels of ambition when they believed that their preferences would be shared with single male classmates. Some women avoid actions that would help their careers in an effort to appear more marriageable, according to the results of experiments conducted with students starting an elite U.S. MBA program. Leonardo Bursztyn, Thomas Fujiwara, and Amanda Pallais report those findings in 'Acting Wife': Marriage Market...