International industry data permits testing whether the industry-specific impact of cross-country differences in institutions or policies is consistent with economic theory. Empirical implementation requires specifying the industry characteristics that determine impact strength. Most of the...

Do high levels of human capital foster economic growth by facilitating technology adoption? If so, countries with more human capital should have adopted more rapidly the skilled-labor augmenting technologies becoming available since the 1970's. High human capital levels should therefore have...

International business transactions pose the problem of deterring bribing of public officials by foreign firms. We first analyze a convention styled after the OECD's "Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions" that requires signatory...

We analyze the determinants of real estate and credit bubbles using a unique borrower-lender matched dataset on mortgage loans in Spain. The dataset contain real estate credit and price conditions (loan principal and spread, and the appraisal and market price) at the mortgage level, matched with...

We study the credit supply effects of the unexpected freeze of the European interbank market, using exhaustive Portuguese loan-level data. We find that banks that rely more on interbank borrowing before the crisis decrease their credit supply more during the crisis. The credit supply reduction...

We analyze the impact of the countercyclical capital buffers held by banks on the supply of credit to firms and their subsequent performance. Countercyclical ‘‘dynamic’’ provisioning that is unrelated to specific loan losses was introduced in Spain in 2000, and modified...