Did the rise of Chinese import competition in the early 2000s affect banks' credit supply policies? Using bank-firm-level data on the universe of Spanish corporate loans, we find that banks rebalanced their loan portfolios away from firms facing Chinese import competition and towards profitable...

I document that financial crises coincide with the sudden reversal of a long period of low aggregate volatility. I argue that shocks to the volatility of total factor productivity are a source of financial instability, and account for both the building-up of risk and the burst of financial...

The aggregation of event types (ETs) is a crucial step for operational risk management techniques. Basel II requires the computation of a 99.9% VaR for each ET, and their aggregation via a simple sum if the dependence among ETs is not specified. Such a procedure assumes perfect positive...

A common feature of financial time series is their strong persistence. Yet, long memory may just be the spurious effect of either structural breaks or slow switching regimes. So far, five testing procedures have been proposed to distinguish between true and spurious long memory. The tests are...

Minimum wages alter the allocation of firm-idiosyncratic risk across workers. To establish this result, we focus on Italy, and leverage employer-employee data matched to firm balance sheets and hand-collected wage floors. We find a relatively larger pass-through of firm-specific labor-demand...