Does adoption of broadband internet in firms enhance labor productivity and increase wages? And is this technological change skill biased or factor neutral? We exploit rich Norwegian data with firm-level information on value added, factor inputs and broadband adoption to answer these questions....

This paper studies how comparative advantage and the political elites' endowments shape long-run performance in an economy with imperfect political institutions. In a capital-scarce economy, an autocrat catering to the needs of landowners favours openness to trade at an early stage of...

Recent work suggests the patterns of international trade may be distorted because of information frictions. Little is known, however, about how advancements in information communication technology (ICT) affect trade patterns. The goal of our paper is to analyze how and why the adoption of such...

Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autocracies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well, others such as the Latin American...

Using highly granular micro data, we document very divergent economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Swedish private-sector firms and their workers. Firms that exported to, or imported from, heavily afflicted countries reduced their output due to disrupted trade. Service firms that operated...

This paper introduces a market size dependent firm entry cost into the Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple (2004) (HMY) version of the Melitz (2003) model. This is a relatively small generalisation, which preserves the analytical solvability of the model. Nevertheless, our model yields several new...