The eurozone has been said to have caught a disease called "secular stagnation". Productive investment in the private sector fell by about 20% overall between 2007 and 2014, while private saving has surged, creating a huge gap between gross domestic savings and investment. The trajectory of...

We provide a first attempt to include off-balance sheet, implicit insurance to SIFIs into a consistent assessment of fiscal sustainability, for 27 countries of the European Union. We first calculate tax gaps à la Blanchard (1990) and Blanchard et al. (1990). We then introduce two alternative...

We study how French exporters react to a VAT shock in a destination country. VAT shocks are by nature almost permanent, exogenous, and have no impact on marginal costs. We argue that the subsequent price reaction therefore identifies to which extent mark-up adjustments tame the impact of a macro...

Recently a small and growing empirical literature has attempted to analyze the role that quality plays in our understanding of trade. In particular, the recent work of Khandelwal (2010) has brought the insights of structural IO models of demand to bear into trade data. Our work builds on this...

We study how the 2004 reform of minimum wage rules in China has affected the survival, average wage, employment and productivity of local firms. To identify the causal effect of minimum wage growth, we use firm-level data for more than 160,000 manufacturing firms active in 2003 and complement...

In this paper, we estimate firm-level markups and test some micro-level predictions of a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous markups. Our theoretical framework is an extended version of the Melitz and Ottaviano (2008) (MO) model that features both quality and...