How do financial market conditions affect real economic performance? Empirical investigations of this question have often relied on measures of external financial dependence (EFD) that are constructed using U.S. data and applied to other countries under the assumption of a stable industry...

We use an augmented gravity model to revisit the effect of similarity in income distributionson bilateral trade flows. Disentangling supply-side and demand-side mechanisms,we document a robust new regularity: while differences in average incomes betweentwo countries increase trade, differences...

We provide novel evidence on the micro-structure of international trade during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global recession exploring a rich firm-level data set from Spain. The analysis is motivated by the surprisingly strong export performance of Spain in the aftermath of the great...

Seminal theories of the firm posit that firm ownership is allocated to minimize contractual inefficiencies. Yet, it remains unclear how much the optimal ownership choice affects firm performance in practice. This paper provides a first quantification of the gains from optimal ownership within...

Services offshoring is on the rise. Due to recent innovations in communication technologies, many services that used to be non-tradable can be delivered from distance today. Still, German services imports have grown much slower than exports over the past decades, indicating under-exploitation of...

This letter uses an augmented gravity model to revisit the effect of similarity in income distributions on bilateral trade flows. We document a robust new empirical regularity: while differences in average incomes between two countries increase trade, differences in income dispersion reduce it....