We study capital misallocation within and across 10 African countries using the World Bank Enterprise Surveys. First, we compare the extent of misallocation among firms within countries. We document high variation in firms' marginal product of capital (MPK), implying that countries could produce...

We document basic facts about prices in online markets in the U.S. and Canada, a rapidly growing segment of the retail sector. Relative to prices in regular stores, prices in online markets are more flexible as well as exhibit stronger pass-through (60-75 percent) and faster convergence...

The "border effect" literature finds that political borders have a very large impact on relative prices, implicitly adding several thousands of miles to trade. In this paper we show that the standard empirical specification suffers from selection bias, and propose a new methodology based on...

This paper revisits the issue of the optimal exchange rate regime in a flexible price environment. The key innovation is that we analyze this question in the context of environments where only a fraction of agents participate in asset market transactions (i.e., asset markets are segmented)....

We examine the role of nominal price rigidities in explaining the deviations from the Law of One Price (LOP) across cities in Japan. Focusing on intra-national relative prices isolates the border effect and thus enables us to extract the pure effect of sticky prices. A two-city model with...

This paper reexamines the evidence on the border effect, the finding that the border drives a wedge between domestic and foreign prices. We argue that the border effect can be inflated by the volatility and persistence of the nominal exchange rate and by the cross-country heterogeneity in the...

We study optimal dynamic Ramsey policies in a standard growth model with financial frictions. For developing countries with low financial wealth, the optimal policy intervention increases labor supply and lowers wages, resulting in higher entrepreneurial profits and faster wealth accumulation....

We study cross-country insurance in a currency union with nominal price and wage rigidities. We provide two results that build the case for the creation of a fiscal union within a currency union. First, we show that, if financial markets are incomplete, the value of gaining access to any given...

In this paper, we investigate time-dependent border and distance effects in the nineteenth century and document clear declines in the importance of these variables through time. What this suggests, in light of the work for the post-1950 era, is that researchers might have correctly identified...