Does limited access to formal savings services impede business growth in poor countries? To shed light on this question, we randomized access to non-interest-bearing bank accounts among two types of self-employed individuals in rural Kenya: market vendors (who are mostly women) and men working...

The effects of geography and productivity on the global pattern of production are captured here in a specific factors gravity model. Simple enough for sharp results, the model is yet rich enough to contain the high dimensional productivity frictions in production and distribution of a many...

Does globalization widen inequality or increase income risk? In the specific factors continuum model of this paper, globalization widens inequality, amplifying the positive (negative) premia for export (import- competing) sectors. Globalization amplifies the risk from idiosyncratic relative...

We ask how export demand shocks associated with the Asian financial crisis affected Chinese exporters. We construct firm-specific exchange rate shocks based on the pre-crisis destinations of firms' exports. Because the shocks were unanticipated and large, they are a plausible instrument for...

Economic theory has identified a number of channels through which openness to international financial flows could raise productivity growth. However, while there is a vast empirical literature analyzing the impact of financial openness on output growth, far less attention has been paid to its...

This paper is an attempt to assess the existence and magnitude of local research spillovers in France. We rely on the model of an extended production function (Cobb-Douglas and Translog) with both local and neighborhood Ramp;D capital stocks. We estimate this model on 312 employment areas as of...

Innovation in SMEs exhibits some peculiar features that most traditional indicators of innovation activity do not capture. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a structural model of innovation which incorporates information on innovation success from firm surveys along with the usual Ramp;D...

Recent advances in measuring cyclical changes in the income distribution raise new questions: How might these distributional changes affect the business cycle itself? We show how counter-cyclical income dispersion can generate counter-cyclical markups in the goods market, without any preference...

We test whether and how the adoption of the euro, narrowly defined as the end of competitive devaluations, has affected member states' productive structures, distinguishing between within and across sector reallocation. We find evidence that the euro has been accompanied by a reallocation of...

Growing concerns over the achievement of U.S. students have led to proposals to reward good teachers and penalize (or fire) bad ones. The leading method for assessing teacher quality is quot;value addedquot; modeling (VAM), which decomposes students' test scores into components attributed to...