Adequate wages are an important tool to shield public officials from special interests and corruption. But what is the equilibrium effect of higher wages in the presence of criminal pressure groups, who use both bribes and violence? By means of a regression discontinuity design, we show that an...

This paper studies the long-run economic impact of dismissing city councils infiltrated by organized crime. Applying a matched difference-in-differences design to the universe of Italian social security records, we find that city council dismissals (CCDs) increase employment, the number of...

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...

We examine the desirability of granting "safe harbor" provisions to creditors of financial intermediaries in sale-and-repurchase (repo) contracts. Exemption from an automatic stay in bankruptcy enables financial intermediaries to raise greater liquidity and induces entry of intermediaries with...

In an RCT with US small businesses, we document that a large share of firms are not well-informed about bankruptcy. Many assume that bankruptcy necessarily entails the death of a business and do not know about Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where debts are renegotiated so that the business can continue...

We study a bank run in India in which private bank branches experience sudden and considerable loss of deposits that seek safety in state-owned public sector banks (PSBs). We trace the consequences of this reallocation using granular data on bank-firm relationships and branch balance sheets. The...

Weak states enable private enforcement but it does not always fade away in the presence of strong states. We develop a general equilibrium model of the market organization of enforcers (self-enforcers, competitive specialized enforcers or monopoly) who defend endowments from predators. We...

Canonical models of crime emphasize economic incentives. Yet, causal evidence of sorting into criminal occupations in response to individual-level variation in incentives is limited. We link administrative socioeconomic microdata with the universe of arrests in Medellín over a decade. We...