What are the effects of a temporary lockdown of the economy? Do firms' deteriorating balance sheets and labor market frictions propagate and prolong the effects? We answer these questions in a model with financial and labor market frictions. The model makes quantitative predictions about the...

Why don't poor countries adopt more productive technologies? Is there a role for policies that coordinate technology adoption? To answer these questions, we develop a quantitative model that features complementarity in firms' technology adoption decisions: The gains from adoption are larger when...

We use tailored surveys and benchmarking in the flat-weave rug industry to better understand the shortcomings of standard productivity measures. TFPQ performs poorly because of variation in product specifications across firms. Controlling for specifications aligns TFPQ with lab benchmarks. We...

Substantial research in development economics has highlighted the presence of weak institutions, market failures and distortions in developing countries. Yet, much of the knowledge generated in international trade comes from workhorse models that abstract from these frictions. This review...

Prices are typically used as proxies for countries' export quality. I relax this strong assumption by exploiting both price and quantity information to estimate the quality of products exported to the U.S. Higher quality is assigned to products with higher market shares conditional on price. The...

Anthropologists have long documented substantial and persistent differences across social groups in the preferences and taboos for particular foods. One natural question to ask is whether such food cultures matter in an economic sense. In particular, can culture constrain caloric intake and...

This paper presents empirical evidence that the growth of export manufacturing in Mexico during a period of major trade reforms, the years 1986-2000, altered the distribution of education. I use variation in the timing of factory openings across commuting zones to show that school dropout...

Technology is the driver of labor allocation across sectors and occupations. Is the impact of technological change on developing countries similar to its impact on developed countries? Will developing countries follow the same development path that developed economies have taken? Our approach...

Does industrial policy work? This is a subject of long-standing debates among economists and policymakers. Using newly digitized microdata, we evaluate the Korean government's policy that promoted heavy and chemical industries between 1973 and 1979 by cutting taxes and building new industrial...

The destructive economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic was distributed unequally across the population. Gender, race and ethnicity, age, education level, and a worker's industry and occupation all mattered. We analyze the initial negative effect and the lingering effect through the recovery...