We assess to which degree an international transfer mechanism can enhance consumption risk sharing as well as allocative efficiency and apply our results to the implicit transfers generated by a potential European unemployment benefit scheme (EUBS). Specifically, we first develop a simple model...

This paper documents a positive relationship between labor-friendly institutions and investment in industrial robots in a sample of advanced economies. Institutions explain a substantial proportion of cross-country variation in automation. The relationship between institutions and robots is...

We present a unified dynamic framework to study the interconnections between international trade and business cycle models. We prove an aggregate equivalence between a competitive, representative firm model that has aggregate production externalities and dynamic trade models that feature...

This paper develops a threshold-augmented dynamic multi-country model (TG-VAR) to quantify the macroeconomic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that there exist threshold effects in the relationship between output growth and excess global volatility at individual country levels in a...

We examine the dynamic impact of household borrowing on the trade balance using data from 33 developing countries and 36 developed countries over the 1980-2017 period. Our findings suggest that the impact of household borrowing on the trade balance is by and large negative, both in the short and...

Conventional wisdom suggests that marginal damages from particulate matter pollution are high in less-developed countries because they are highly polluted. Using administrative data on the universe of births and deaths, we explore birthweight and mortality effects of gestational particulate...

We provide an overview of the integration of refugees into the labor markets of a number of high-income countries. Discussing the ways in which refugees and economic migrants are differently selected and so might be expected to perform differently in a host country's labor market, we examine...

Why are average hours worked per adult lower in rich countries than in poor countries? We consider two natural explanations: income effects in preferences, in which leisure becomes more valuable when income rises, and distortionary tax systems, which are more prevalent in richer countries. To...