This paper uses micro-data from the World Bank Investment Climate Surveys 2002-2006 to investigate how foreign ownership and access to external finance affect the likelihood of manufacturers in emerging markets to export and/or import. Applying propensity score matching to control for...

This paper uses micro-data from the World Bank Investment Climate Surveys 2002-2006 to investigate how foreign ownership and access to external finance affect the likelihood of manufacturers in emerging markets to export and/or import. Applying propensity score matching to control for...

We propose a quantitative framework for the analysis of industrialization in which specialization in manufacturing or agriculture is driven by comparative advantage and non-homothetic preferences. Countries are integrated through trade but trade is not costless and geographic position matters....

In their famous paper on the “Big Push”, Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny (1989) show how the combination of increasing returns to scale at the firm level and pecuniary externalities can give rise to a poverty trap, thereby formalising an old idea due to Rosenstein-Rodan (1943). We develop in...

We propose a quantitative framework for the analysis of industrialization in which specialization in manufacturing or agriculture is driven by comparative advantage and non-homothetic preferences. Countries are integrated through trade but trade is not costless and geographic position matters....

We examine Chinese-US trade flows over the 1994-2012 period, and find that, in line with the conventional wisdom, the value of China’s exports to the US responds negatively to real renminbi (RMB) appreciation, while import responds positively. Further, the combined empirical price effects on...

Agents in a finite two-sided market are matched assortatively, based on costly investments. Besides signaling private, complementary types, investments generate direct benefits for partners. We explore quantitative properties of the equilibrium investment behavior. The bilateral external...

We use a novel quarterly dataset of U.S. states to examine the dynamics and determinants of relative government spending multipliers in the decade surrounding the Great Recession. We find average multipliers that are similar to those that have been reported for the decades preceding the crisis,...

A number of recent studies regress a “narratively” identified measure of a macroeconomic shock directly on an outcome variable. In this note, we argue that this approach can be viewed as the reduced-form regression of an instrumental variable approach in which the narrative time series is...

Using state-dependent local projection methods and historical U.S. data, we find that government spending multipliers are considerably larger in periods of private debt overhang. In particular, we find significant crowding-out of personal consumption and investment in low-debt states, resulting...