This paper investigates the causal impact of oil price fluctuations on financial markets since January 2014. Following a heteroscedasticity-based event study approach, the paper instruments changes in oil prices by exogenous shocks in oil supply. It finds that oil price declines raise...

This paper estimates dynamic employment multipliers in a U.S. county during 1998-2015. On average, one exogenous tradable job gain creates 1.1 jobs in the rest of the county economy in the same year, but is offset by losses of 0.23 job one year later and 0.32 job two years later. The multiplier...

Using the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, we investigate the prevalence and correlates of collateralized borrowing in 131 countries between 2005-2017. Overall, 77 percent of loans require collateral, and the median loan-to-collateral value is 60 percent. Small firms and loans from non-bank...

This paper studies the effects of a reform in Serbia that transferred business registration from regional courts to a centralized agency. Using administrative data, the analysis employs a difference-in-difference strategy that compares new firms before and after the reform across districts based...

This paper documents the existence of a "middle-income trap" for the Middle East and North Africa region. It argues that the economic woes of the Middle East and North Africa offer new insights into the debate on the trap which has thus far focused on the East Asia and Pacific region. The...

This paper examines the labor market impacts of a large-scale marine environmental crisis caused by toxic chemical contamination in Vietnam's central coast in 2016. Combining labor force surveys with satellite data on fishing-boat detection, the analysis finds negative and heterogeneous impacts...

The pattern of debt flows to peripheral European Monetary Union members seems puzzling: they are mostly indirect and channeled through the large countries of the European Monetary Union. This paper examines to what extent the introduction of the euro and the elimination of the intra-area...

Did unemployment in the Great Recession hurt people's health? The broad answer is no: job losses have statistically insignificant impacts on mortality. The exogenous sources of job losses in a U.S. county is the tradable job losses driven by external demand collapses during the Great Recession....

This paper explores the spillover effects of job losses via input linkages during the Great Recession. Exploiting exogenous variation in tradable employment shocks across U.S. counties, the paper finds that job losses in the tradable sectors cause further job losses in local supporting services....

This paper provides empirical evidence for the Keynesian demand-driven propagation: initial rounds of job losses lead to additional rounds of job losses. The paper shows that U.S. counties with higher pre-existing exposure to tradable industries experienced larger job losses in non-tradable...