How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the connection between the epidemiology of a virus, the structure of the economy and society that becomes exposed to it, and the actions chosen by government and by individuals and communities to combat it or ameliorate its economic impact....

We study how firms respond to import competition by increasing the speed of trade. We use data on all Portuguese textile and clothing exporters' monthly transactions and exploit the exogenous increase in competition following the removal of Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) quotas on Chinese...

Menstruation can limit female labor force participation, especially in low-income countries, where menstrual hygiene practices are constrained by lack of finances and information. In a randomized controlled trial with around 1,900 female workers from four Bangladeshi garment factories, we relax...

In this paper we investigate trade union formation. To this end we apply a model with two types of labour where the interests of both groups of labourers are represented by either a joint (industry) labour union or by two independent group-specific (professional) labour unions. We investigate...

We analyze union behavior in a model with membership dynamics and compare the labor market outcomes to static union models. Based on empirical findings we modify standard models and show that the well-known result that static models overstate distortions caused by unions only holds in the...

The paper develops an equilibrium search and matching model where two-person families as well as singles participate in the labor market. We show that equilibrium entails wage dispersion among equally productive risk-averse workers. Marital status as well as spousal labor market status matter...

What are the impacts of labor tax reform on wage setting and employment to keep the relative tax burden per low-skilled and high-skilled workers constant in the case of heterogeneous domestic labor markets, i.e. imperfect competition in low-skilled labor and perfect competition in high-skilled...