The recent financial crisis has focused attention on the relationship between access to finance and international trade, triggering a burgeoning segment of the literature evaluating this link empirically. We review the role of finance in international trade and the main theories connecting them....

Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries stand out in international comparisons of de jure obstacles to female employment and entrepreneurship. These obstacles manifest themselves in low rates of female labor participation, entrepreneurship, and ownership. Recent research suggests a...

Despite the microeconomic evidence supporting the superior idiosyncratic productivity of multinational firms (MFN) and their affiliates, cross-country studies fail to find robust evidence of a positive relationship between Foreign Direct Investment and growth. In order to study the aggregate...

I study the aggregate implications of the entry of Multinational Firms (MNFs) in a two country Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model in which firms have heterogeneous productivity in the sense of Ghironi and Melitz (2005). Unlike the extant open economy macroeconomics literature, this...

The level of aggregate excess reserves held by U.S. depository institutions increased significantly at the peak of the 2007-09 financial crisis. Although the amount of aggregate reserves is determined almost entirely by the policy initiatives of the central bank that act on the asset side of its...