When external capital markets are stressed they may not reallocate resources between firms. We show that resource allocation within firms' internal capital markets provides an important force countervailing financial market dislocation. Using data on US conglomerates we empirically verify that...

"Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using...

"While substantial research finds that financial development boosts overall economic growth, we study whether financial development disproportionately raises the incomes of the poor and alleviates poverty. Using a broad cross-country sample, we distinguish among competing theoretical predictions...

This paper uses firm-level information to evaluate how crises are transmitted internationally. It constructs a new data set of financial statistics, industry information, geographic data, and stock returns for over 10,000 companies in 46 countries to test what types of firms were most affected...

This paper describes the correlations between inequality and the growth rates in cross-country data. Using non-parametric methods, we show that the growth rate is an inverted U-shaped function of net changes in inequality: Changes in inequality (in any direction) are associated with reduced...

In this paper we first trace the changing nature of banking, currency and debt crises from the last century to the present. Each type of crisis has transmogrified in the presence of official intervention and the creation of a safety net. A similar pattern is observed for international rescue...

To the extent that trade policy affects trade flows between countries, the ramifications can be far-reaching from an economic growth perspective. This paper examines one aspect of these ramifications, namely the impact of changes in the extent of trade between countries on changes in the rate of...