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...

by conditional first moments.

What are the micro and macro implications of a credit crunch? We study this question in a model where heterogeneous entrepreneurs can finance their investment by borrowing subject to collateral constraints and/or by using internal funds. We discipline our theory by requiring that the size...

This project uses a randomized field experiment in Egypt to examine the channels through which increasing market access can drive economic growth and reduce poverty. We focus on a particular export promotion intervention designed to match Egyptian Artisan carpet makers with Western buyers and...

This paper examines the role of the market for high-skilled labor in explaining variation in the levels and dynamics of the service share, home production time, and market labor across countries. We establish and extend key facts for a cross-section of countries. First, growth in the total share...

We study the evolution of trade policies over time and across countries. We consider a model in which own and neighbors' past experiences influence policy choices, through their effect on policymakers' beliefs. We estimate the model using a large panel of countries. We find that there is a...

We provide a tractable theory of innovation and diffusion of technologies to explore the role of international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI). We model innovation and diffusion as a process involving the combination of new ideas with insights from other industries or countries. We...

We study the effect of alternative monetary policies during a credit crunch, modeled as a shock to collateral constraints. We consider a model with entrepreneurs that are heterogeneous in their productivity and net worth, face collateral constraints that limit their investment, and whose...

This paper quanties the role that increases in the demand for skill intensive goods and services, the ecient scale of production of services, and female labor supply have in explaining the growth of services. We extend the model in Buera and Kaboski (2012a,b) to a two-person household model,...