We build a new dataset of listed and private nonfinancial zombie firms for a large set of Advanced Economies and Emerging Markets over the last two decades. We find that the share of these unproductive and unviable firms has been rising worldwide, especially since the GFC and the Covid-19...

Both sides of the institutions and growth debate have resorted largely to microeconometric techniques in testing hypotheses. In this paper, I build a panel structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model for a short panel of 119 countries over 10 years and find support for the institutions...

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century puts forth a logically consistent explanation for changes in income and wealth inequality patterns. However, while rich in data, the book provides no formal empirical testing for its theoretical causal chain. In this paper, I build a set of...

This paper assesses the real effects of the energy reform in Mexico by looking at its impact on manufacturing output through changes in energy prices. Using sub-sector and state-level manufacturing output data, along with past variation in energy prices, we find electricity prices - relative to...

We document that the U.S. dollar exchange rate drives global trade prices and volumes. Using a newly constructed data set of bilateral price and volume indices for more than 2,500 country pairs, we establish the following facts: 1) The dollar exchange rate quantitatively dominates the bilateral...

In terms of size, the net income balance (IB) is comparable to the trade balance (TB) for many countries. Yet the role of the IB in mitigating external vulnerabilities or complicating external adjustment remains underexplored. This paper studies the role of the IB in stabilizing or destabilizing...

Using a panel of firm-level data, this paper examines the effects of India's trade reforms in the early 1990s on firm productivity in the manufacturing sector, focusing on the interaction between this policy shock and firm and environment characteristics. The rapid and comprehensive tariff...

This paper compares two alternative measures of technology differences across industrial countries during 1970-92: one measures differences in labor productivity (the Ricardian measure), and the other differences in total factor productivity (the Hicksian measure). The distinction between the...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of tariffs when production is organized in global value chains. Using global input-output matrices, we construct four different tariff measures that capture the direct and indirect exposure to tariffs at different stages of the production chain for...

This paper quantifies the effects of external risks for Peru, with particular attention to two major external risks, China's investment slowdown and the U.S. monetary policy tightening. In particular, a macroeconomic model for a small open and partially dollarized economy is developed and...