Market failures provide a rationale for policy intervention. But policies are often hard to alter once in place. We argue that this inertia can result in well-intended policies having sizable negative long-run effects on aggregate output and productivity. In our theory, financial frictions...

In our model, short-sighted policy-makers choose to subsidize productive entrepreneurs to relax their limited commitments. In the short-run, this policy reallocates capital from unproductive towards productive entrepreneurs, and boosts per-capita income, TFP and capital accumulation. Over time,...

We review both the theoretical and empirical literature on entrepreneurship and financial frictions, with an emphasis on the heterogeneous and dynamic micro-level implications of financial frictions for macro development.

We provide a quantitative evaluation of the aggregate and distributional impact of microfinance or credit programs targeted toward small businesses. We find that the redistributive impact of microfinance is stronger in general equilibrium than in partial equilibrium, but the impact on aggregate...

We develop a quantitative framework to explain the relationship between aggregate/sector-level total factor productivity (TFP) and financial development across countries. Financial frictions distort the allocation of capital and entrepreneurial talent across production units, adversely affecting...

We develop a model of retirement and human capital investment to study the effects of tax and retirement policies. Workers choose the supply of raw labor (career length) and also the human capital embodied in their labor. Our model explains a significant fraction of the US-Europe difference in...

We build a model of retirement and assess what are the main forces that drove the macroeconomic pattern in retirement in the US economy during the 20th century. We in particular consider the role of technological progress, demographic change and the Social Security system.

market frictions over time with self-financing. With intermediate levels of frictions in the capital market, welfare costs of market incompleteness have a U shape against the persistence of idiosyncratic shocks. The right arm of the U reflects the difficulty of self-insurance against very...

2. Allowing entrepreneurs to move across borders. We find that entrepreneurs who are highly-talented but financially constrained in the financially less developed country migrate to the more developed country to take advantage of better financial markets. We interpret this outcome as brain...