We estimate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on business failures among small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in seventeen countries using a large representative firm-level database. We use a simple model of firm cost-minimization and measure each firm's liquidity shortfall during and after...

This paper assesses the prospects of a 2021 time bomb in SME failures triggered by the generous support policies enacted during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. Policies implemented in 2020, on their own, do not create a 2021 "time-bomb" for SMEs. Rather, business failures and policy costs remain...

Learning by exporting refers to the mechanism whereby firms improve their performance (productivity) after entering export markets. Although this mechanism is often mentioned in policy documents, a significant share of econometric studies has not found evidence for this hypothesis. This paper...

In a model that is consistent with the existence of a home bias and with foreign investors that are less informed than domestic investors, we show that unexpectedly high worldwide returns lead to net equity inflows into small countries. In addition, a small country experiences net equity inflows...

In this paper, we propose an extension of the productivity decomposition method developed by Olley & Pakes (1996). This extension provides an accounting for the contributions of both firm entry and exit to aggregate productivity changes. It breaks down the contribution of surviving firms into a...

"We explore the impact of a tax reform in some provinces of China which eliminated the value-added tax on some investment goods. While the goal of the experiment was to encourage upgrading of technology, our results suggest that there was no evident increase overall in fixed investment, and...

In an earlier paper, titled "Non-linear effects of tax changes on output: The role of the initial level of taxation," we estimated tax multipliers using (i) a novel dataset on value-added taxes for 51 countries (21 industrial and 30 developing) for the period 1970-2014, and (ii) the so-called...

We exploit the unexpected announcement of an immediate, temporary VAT cut in Germany in the second half of 2020 as a natural experiment to study the spending response to unconventional fiscal policy. We use survey and scanner data on households' consumption expenditures and their perceived...

Taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) are relatively new and there is little evidence about their impact on SSB consumption or body mass index (as opposed to prices, purchases, or sales), their impact on youth (as opposed to on adults), or their impact in non-Western nations. This paper adds...

Are firms sophisticated maximizers, or do they consistently make errors? Using transaction-level data from Ugandan value-added tax (VAT) returns, we show that sellers and buyers report different amounts 79% of the time, despite invoices being easily cross-checked. We estimate that 25% of firms...