Place-based subsidies are often targeted to firms in distressed regions on the premise that local labor is underutilized. This paper studies how wage-setting institutions shape the incidence and efficiency of a large investment subsidy program in Italy. Funding was allocated to firms based on rankings and fixed budgets, which we exploit at two levels: a regression discontinuity across participating firms, and a recentered instrument across labor markets. Combining application records, longitudinal firm data, and matched employer–employee data, we show that funded firms expand employment without raising average wages or upgrading workforce composition. Incumbent workers benefit primarily through additional weeks of employment, especially those with weaker labor market attachment, while wage gains are concentrated among workers earning above their contractual floors. We find no evidence of competitor firms increasing wages in the same labor market, and no detectable in-migration. Together, these findings suggest that contractual minima bind for most workers, yielding employment rationing. While the subsidies alleviate the underemployment generated by rationing, the program’s cost still outweighs its estimated social benefits.

The latest resurgence in the U.S. of policies aimed at reducing imports and bolstering domestic production has included the expansion of Buy American provisions. While some of these are new and untested, in this paper we evaluate the employment and welfare impact of long-standing procurement limitations on the purchase of foreign products by the U.S. Federal Government. Employing procurement micro-data, we calibrate a quantitative trade model adapted to include features relevant to the Buy American Act: a government sector, policy barriers in final and intermediate goods, labor force participation, and external economies of scale. We show that current Buy American restrictions on final goods create about 100,000 jobs at a welfare cost of about $170,000 per job. The imminent tightening of domestic-content rules for inputs to 75% creates about 86,600 jobs at a welfare cost of about $119,000 per job. We also find scant evidence of the use of Buy American rules as an effective industrial policy tool.

Can technology relax constraints on educational supply and expand local productive capacity? We exploit a quasi-natural experiment in postwar Italy to estimate the causal impact of educational television on adult skills and local economic activity. In 1960, the Italian public broadcaster and the Ministry of Education expanded televised adult education, with Non è mai troppo tardi (“It Is Never Too Late”) as a flagship program—a daily literacy course supported by a national network of collective viewing centers designed to broaden access. We digitize historical records of transmitter locations and technical characteristics to predict television reception and link these predictions to industrial- and population-census data. Our effects are identified from variation in signal diffraction caused by topography, conditional on transmitter placement. We estimate stacked long differences across the 1951, 1961, and 1971 censuses for roughly 7,700 municipalities. A one-standard-deviation increase in signal strength raised adult literacy by 0.18 percentage points during the program decade relative to the preceding decade—17% of the average decadal gain. It also increased labor-force participation by 1.0 percentage point overall and 1.4 percentage points among women, and shifted employment out of agriculture. Labor-market outcomes responded to reception in neighboring municipalities within approximately 15 kilometers, consistent with local spillovers. Estimated literacy gains were larger in initially less literate municipalities and in places with collective viewing centers. Our findings suggest that broadcast technology can expand educational provision and support structural transformation, with benefits extending across municipal boundaries.

Outside options are central to models of wage determination, but the alternatives available to workers are rarely observed directly. We study the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), a chartered trading monopoly whose dominance in the Hudson Bay basin was challenged by the expansion of the North West Company. We digitize over a century of HBC account books, which value furs received from Indigenous trappers and goods paid in exchange in a common unit, and reconstruct the locations, ownership, and operating dates of recorded trading posts. Together, these sources allow us to measure trappers’ compensation relative to the company’s valuation of their output and trace how it changed as rival buyers came within reach. We find that trappers received approximately two thirds of the HBC’s Standard valuation before 1770 and nearly all of it by the 1790s. Most of this increase occurred within existing posts. With post and decade fixed effects, a rival within 500 kilometers was associated with a 4.4 percentage point higher share, while proximity to other HBC posts showed no comparable association. A calibrated spatial oligopsony model connects trading terms to the geography and ownership of alternative posts and accounts for part of the observed increase.