This paper provides first firm-level evidence of the links between income inequality and the patterns of trade and export prices. We identify a theoretical mechanism behind these links, which suggests that a more unequal income distribution leads to higher average prices. We test the theory...

A body of literature suggests that ethnic heterogeneity limits economic growth. This paper provides microeconometric evidence on the direct effect of ethnic divisions on productivity. In team production at a plant in Kenya, an upstream worker supplies and distributes flowers to two downstream...

Why is it that exporter productivity premia (EPP) differ so widely in size? We take this question to the theory and to the data. We derive the sectoral EPP in a standard heterogeneous firms trade model and apply the insights from the model to 13 years of data for all Danish manufacturing firms....

Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves may be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple...

We investigate the effects of economic crises on the subsequent economic performance, economic reform, democratization and institutional change. Our analysis is based on a sample of post-communist countries, most of which experienced severe economic crises during the 1990s. We find that the...

We revisit the relationship between financial development and economic growth in a panel of 52 middle income countries over the 1980-2008 period, using pooled mean group estimator in a dynamic heterogeneous panel setting. We show that financial development does not have a linear positive...

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...