We assess the impact, on workforce contract composition, employment adjustment dynamics and productivity, of a combination of changes in the Colombian labor legislation which increased firm's ability of using contracts of a temporary nature, and posterior changes that increased the costs...

Using a rich dataset of Colombian manufacturing establishments, we illustrate scarring effects of recessions operating through inefficient exit induced by heterogeneous credit constraints. We show that financially constrained businesses may be forced to exit the market during recessions even if...

We present a model of political budget cycles in which incumbents influence voters by targeting government spending to specific groups of voters at the expense of other voters or other expenditures. Each voter faces a signal extraction problem: being targeted with expenditure before the election...