Governments in advanced and developing economies allocate capital subsidies to firms in a discretionary fashion through industrial policy or state aid. Do such discretionary policies mitigate or exacerbate the misallocation of resources across firms? This paper analyzes a typical EU policy using...

This document is the online appendix to the paper ‘Firm Subsidies and Resource Misallocation’ (https://ssrn.com/abstract=3483259) and is organized in six sections. Section A presents data showing the importance of government aid to firms around the world. Section B provides information on...

For a large set of countries, we document how the labor earnings inequality varies with GDP per capita. As countries get richer, the mean-to-median ratio and the Gini coefficient decline. Yet, this decline masks divergent patterns: while inequality at the top of the earnings distribution falls,...

The correlation between a firm’s size and its productivity level varies considerably across OECD countries, suggesting that some countries are more successful at channelling resources to high productivity firms than others. Accordingly, we examine the extent to which regulations affecting...

There are widespread differences in total factor productivity across producers in the U.S. and around the world. To help explain these variations, we devise a general test for misallocation in input choices - the underuse of effective inputs and overuse of ineffective ones. Misallocation implies...

Measures of institutional quality are strong predictors of cross-country differences in income and productivity. The institutional economics literature has long maintained that one way institutions influence economic growth is by impacting the efficient allocation of production factors across...

We develop a measure of static misallocation that separates uncertainty from misallocation generated by tax-like distortions. In the Finnish firm-level data, uncertainty accounts for the majority of ex post misallocation and explains a strong decreasing age-dependent trend in it. To understand...

We study the role of firm heterogeneity in affecting business cycle dynamics and optimal stabilization policy. Firms differ in their degree of cyclicality, and hence, exposure to aggregate risk, leading to firm-specific risk premia that influence resource allocations. The heterogeneous firm...

Market frictions prevent the efficient allocation of factors of production, slow down structural transformation and lead to costs in terms of lower output and aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). We use a theoretical framework developed by Aoki (2012) featuring sector-specific frictions on...