This paper examines the economic effects of employment protection legislation in a sample of developed and developing countries. By implementing a difference-in-differences test, we lessen the potentially severe endogeneity and omitted variable problems associated with cross-country regressions....

This paper examines the economic effects of employment protection legislation in a sample of developed and developing countries. By implementing a difference-in-differences test, we lessen the potentially severe endogeneity and omitted variable problems associated with cross-country regressions....

This paper uses a new dataset to reassess the relationship between bank ownership and bank performance, providing separate estimations for developing and industrial countries. It finds that state-owned banks located in developing countries tend to have lower profitability and higher costs than...

This paper builds a new dataset of bank ownership and bank performance covering approximately 50,000 observations for 119 countries over the 1995-2002 period. Next it uses the dataset to reassess the relationship between bank ownership and bank performance providing separated estimations for...

In recent years, Latin American banking sectors have experienced an accelerated process of concentration and foreign penetration that has prompted diverse views regarding its implications for the competitive behavior of banks and for the financial stability of the system as a whole. Exploiting a...

This article studies the relationship between creditor protection and credit responses to macroeconomic shocks. Using a data set on legal determinants of finance in a panel of data on aggregate credit growth for 79 countries during 1990-2004, it is shown that credit is more responsive to...

This paper demonstrates the causal effect of new technologies on the U.S. labor market. I employ information and communications technology, and robot penetration, as two proxy for new technologies to assess the effect of automation on 795 occupations across 450 industries between 2004 and 2016....

The incidence of alternative work arrangements has risen during recent decades, affecting the shape of the economy and leading to calls for changes in labor regulation. In this paper, we study the demand for temporary agency work (TAW) and the effects of a reform in Chile that increased the...

This paper estimates the elasticity of substitution of U.S. imports using detailed trade data over the 1990-2003 period. The authors use a two-stage least squares framework in order to identify the elasticity parameter of interest. The authors use the elasticity estimates to assess the extent to...

Recent literature has emphasized the importance of transport costs and infrastructure in explaining trade, access to markets, and increases in per capita income. For most Latin American countries, transport costs are a greater barrier to U.S. markets than import tariffs. We investigate the...