Covid-19 crisis have revealed the most fragile social and economic aspects worldwide while confronting this overpowering collective challenge, yet having more impact on zones already vulnerable before pandemic broke in the first wave. Covidemia affected the agricultural sector in EU in the...

We present a simple model that illustrates how democracy may improve the quality of economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracy on institutional quality is increasing...

We study the effects of financial sanctions on cross-border credit supply. Using a differences-in-differences approach to analyze eleven sanctions episodes between 2002 and 2015, we find that banks located in Germany reduce their positions in countries with sanctioned entities by 38%. The...

The impact of robots on employment and trade is a highly discussed topic in the academic and public debates. Particularly, there are concerns that automation may threat jobs in emerging countries given the erosion of the labour cost advantage. We provide evidence on the effects of robots on...

We use firm-level data for 15 countries and 13 manufacturing sectors to estimate firm-level productivity parameters and to establish representative country-sector-specific empirical productivity distributions. We use these distributions against the backdrop of multi-sector versions of the models...

Why are trade agreements regional? I address this question in a model of oligopoly featuring product variety. Tariffs have the effect of manipulating a country's terms of trade and shifting profits towards the domestic market at the expense of foreign trade partners. Countries endogenously form...

I analyze the effects of ethnic divisions on the provision of public goods. Using OpenStreetMap data, I construct a new global dataset of locations of public amenities, such as schools, hospital and libraries. I allow for the possibility that the data may be systematically incomplete using two...

We show in this paper that trade in tasks can explain increasing resistance to globalization in industrialized countries. In a traditional trade model of a small open economy, we demonstrate that schooling provides protection against losses from trade if trade increases the relative price of the...