A unique legal reform in 2004 in Sweden redistributed collateral rights from banks holding floating liens to unsecured creditors without changing the value of assets on firms' balance sheets. Using a country-wide panel of all incorporated firms, we document that a zero-sum redistribution of...

We study the economic implications of regional favoritism, a form of distributive politics that redistributes resources spatially within countries. We use a large sample of enterprise surveys spanning across many low and middle income countries, and utilize transitions of national political...

While past decades were characterized by economic liberalization and deregulation, there re-mains an enduring presence of political influence over the private economy. Such influence can either benefit (e.g. government support addressed at survival and growth prospects) or harm (e.g. reduced...

We study the economic implications of regional favoritism, a form of distributive politics that redistributes resources geographically within countries. Using enterprise surveys from low- and middle-income countries, we document that firms located close to leaders' birthplaces grow substantially...

Climate policy often implies increasing energy prices. Due to incomplete regulation across the globe, concerns about their competitiveness and employment effects play an important role in the policy debate. Using micro-data on electricity network charges and the official census data for Germany,...

This empirical paper documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany. We use unique newly...

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between exporting and productivity in the case of Vietnam using an extensive firm level panel dataset for the period 2005-11. We separate out productivity effects of exporting due to self-selection allowing us to identify the extent to which firms...

If the relation between investment and economic growth is well established in the macroeconomic literature, the existence of a similar link at the level of the firm has been challenged by empirical work. This paper investigates the channels linking investment and firm performance in the French...

This empirical paper documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany. We use unique newly...

This paper evaluates the intent to treat local average treatment effects of the Colombian apprenticeship contract on manufacturing firm dynamics taking advantage of an exogenous variation generated by the 2002 labor reform and the regulation design. This evaluation is appealing because very...