We document a large decrease in earnings inequality in Brazil between 1996 and 2012.Using administrative linked employer-employee data, we fit high-dimensional worker and firm fixed effects models to understand the sources of this decrease. Firm effects account for40 percent of the total...

A key feature of developing economies is that wages in agriculture are significantlybelow those of other sectors. Using Brazilian household surveys and administrativepanel data, I use information on workers who switch sectors to decompose the driversof this gap. I find that most of the gap is...

We document that past highly inflationary episodes are often characterized by a steeper inflationslack relationship. We show that model-generated data from a standard small Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model can replicate this empirical finding when estimated with different...

We examine how the cost of corporate credit varies around fiscal consolidations aimed at reducing government debt. Using a new dataset on fiscal consolidations and syndicated corporate loan data, we find that loan spreads increase with fiscal consolidations, especially for small firms, domestic...

We examine the extent to which regulations of entry and credit access are related to competition using data on 28 manufacturing sectors across 64 countries. A robust finding is that bureaucratic and costly entry regulations tend to hamper competition, as proxied by the price-cost margin, in the...

The COVID-19 pandemic could result in large government interventions in the banking industry. To shed light on the possible consequences on market power, we rely on the experience of the global financial crisis and exploit granular data on government interventions in more than 800 banks across...

Housing cycles and their impact on the financial system and the macroeconomy have become the center of attention following the global financial crisis. This paper documents the characteristics of housing cycles in a large set of countries, and examines the determinants of house price movements....

A large share of cross-country differences in productivity is explained by differences in agricultural productivity. Using a combination of sub-national agricultural statistics and geospatial datasets on crop-specific potential yields, we study the main drivers of this variation from a...