This study examines the relationships between democratic politics and systematic (or country-specific) financial risk. Low financial risk is crucial to any well-functioning economy, as it encourages capital investment, facilitates growth, and enhances overall economic performance. Up until now,...

In this paper, we study the role of risk-sharing in entrepreneurship-driven innovation. Studying entrepreneurship and innovation entails modeling an occupational choice and an effort choice. Risk-sharing may increase the number of individuals who become entrepreneurs by limiting the downside...

This paper studies the implications of perceived default risk for aggregate output and productivity. Using a model of credit contracts with moral hazard, we show that a firm's probability of default is a sufficient statistic for capital allocation. The theoretical framework suggests an aggregate...

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 show that an increase in aggregate uncertainty - measured by stock market volatility - reduces productivity growth more in industries that depend heavily on external finance. The mechanism at play is that during periods of high uncertainty, firms that are credit constrained switch the...

This article describes the construction of an open-source growth-at-risk (GaR) model. The model provides a flexible analytical tool for policymakers and researchers aiming to use the GaR approach to characterize the probability density of GDP growth conditional on domestic and international...