In the U.S., the average 40 year old plant employs almost eight times as many workers as the typical plant five years or younger. In contrast, surviving Indian plants exhibit little growth in terms of either employment or output. Mexico is intermediate to India and the U.S. in these respects:...

What is the effect of cash injections during financial crises? Exploiting county-level variation arising from random weather shocks during the 1980s Farm Debt Crisis, we analyze and measure the effect of local cash flow shocks on the real and financial sector. We show that such cash flow shocks...

In this paper we show that the study of the farm size-productivity relationship hinges on the choice of productivity measure. Our main insight is that using yields, a partial measure of productivity, may not be informative for the size-productivity relationship because, in addition to total...

This paper explores the combined effects of reductions in trade frictions, tariffs, and firing costs on firm dynamics, job turnover, and wage distributions. It uses establishment-level data from Colombia to estimate an open economy dynamic model that links trade to job flows in a new way. The...

This paper studies the effects of marketing choice to firm growth. I assume that firm-level growth is the result of idiosyncratic productivity improvements with continuous arrival of new potential producers. A firm enters a market if it is profitable to incur the marginal cost to reach the first...

We examine whether the Colombian trade reform can explain any of Colombia's decline in urban poverty between 1984 and 1995. Our approach focuses on short- and medium- run channels through which trade reform could affect poverty. Despite the chronological coincidence of the poverty reduction with...

We develop a political economy model where some politicians have a comparative advantage in undertaking a task and this gives them an electoral advantage. This creates an incentive to underperform in the task in order to maintain their advantage. We interpret the model in the context of fighting...

Slavery has been a major institution of labor coercion throughout history. Colonial societies used slavery intensively across the Americas, and slavery remained prevalent in most countries after independence from the European powers. We investigate the impact of slavery on long-run development...

In this paper we test whether procrastination and planning problems affect the performance, compensation and work satisfaction among employees. We conducted a randomized controlled experiment with a bank in Colombia to change the frequency and intensity with which employees received reminders...

We use new manufacturing GDP time series to examine the industrialization in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia since the early twentieth century. We uncover variation across countries and over time that the literature on industrialization had overlooked. Rather than providing a single...