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 their role as agenda setters and implementers of political decisions, bureaucrats potentially have the power to influence decisions in their own favor. It is however difficult to empirically test whether bureaucrats actually are involved in such actions. In this paper we suggest and apply a...

One goal of the public employment service is to facilitate matching between unemployed job seekers and job vacancies; another goal is to monitor job search so as to bring search efforts among the unemployed in line with search requirements. The referral of job seekers to vacancies is one...