This paper investigates the causal impact of oil price fluctuations on financial markets since January 2014. Following a heteroscedasticity-based event study approach, the paper instruments changes in oil prices by exogenous shocks in oil supply. It finds that oil price declines raise...

This paper examines resource misallocation within narrow industries in Turkey. It finds that resource misallocation in Turkey is substantial. The hypothetical gain from moving to "U.S. efficiency" is 24.5 percent of manufacturing total factor productivity in 2014. The evolution of resource...

The pattern of debt flows to peripheral European Monetary Union members seems puzzling: they are mostly indirect and channeled through the large countries of the European Monetary Union. This paper examines to what extent the introduction of the euro and the elimination of the intra-area...

Did unemployment in the Great Recession hurt people's health? The broad answer is no: job losses have statistically insignificant impacts on mortality. The exogenous sources of job losses in a U.S. county is the tradable job losses driven by external demand collapses during the Great Recession....

This paper explores the spillover effects of job losses via input-output linkages during the Great Recession. Exploiting exogenous variation in tradable employment shocks across U.S. counties, the paper finds that job losses in a county’s tradable sectors cause further job losses in the...

This paper examines whether domestic output growth helps attract capital inflows and, in turn, capital inflows help boost output growth in a set of 38 Sub-Saharan African countries. Using a two-step approach to address reverse causality and omitted variable issues, the paper finds that output...

Is there a "middle income trap"? Theory suggests that the determinants of growth at low and high income levels may be different. If countries struggle to transition from growth strategies that are effective at low income levels to growth strategies that are effective at high income levels, they...

In the past two decades, cross-border portfolio holdings of a large variety of assets have risen sharply. This has created an important role for changes in asset prices of a country's external assets and liabilities (i.e. "valuation effects") in affecting the country's net foreign asset...

Using the World Bank Enterprise Survey covering 6,800 firms across 43 developing countries, this paper investigates the prevalence and determinants of collateralized borrowing. It focuses on the following two aspects: (1) whether firms' loans from financial institutions require collateral (the...

In countries with limited access to finance, firms accumulate retained earnings to finance indivisible investment projects. McKinnon (1973) illustrates that when cash is used as a primary store of value, inflation may discourage investment as it increases the cost of accumulating retained...