Italy's labor productivity in market services has declined since 2000, underperforming manufacturing and peer European countries, especially in strongly regulated sectors. A model of monopolistic competition is used to identify which service sectors would benefit more from removing entry and/or...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effect and underlying firm-level transmission channels of a reduction in business entry costs. We provide novel evidence on the response of firms' entry, exit, and employment decisions. To do so, we use as a natural experiment a reform in Portugal that...

This paper examines the effect of macroeconomic factors such as interest rate, stock market index and remittance on the market share of initial public offerings (IPOs) in Nepal between 1993/94-2015/16. The factors such as stock market index and remittance have more significant relationship with...

In the last decade, over half of the EU countries in the euro area or with currenciespegged to the euro were hit by large risk premium shocks. Previous papers havefocused on the impact of these shocks on demand. This paper, by contrast, focuses onthe impact on supply. We show that risk premium...

The assessment of macroeconomic conditions in real time is challenging. Dynamic factor models, which summarize the comovement across many macroeconomic time series as driven by a small number of shocks, have become the workhorse tool for ‘nowcasting' activity. This paper develops a novel...

This paper seeks to illuminate the uncertainty in official GDP per capita measuresusing auxiliary data. Using satellite-recorded nighttime lights as an additional measurementof true GDP per capita, we provide a statistical framework, in which the error inofficial GDP per capita may depend on the...

Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose measurement error is plausibly independent of the errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...

This paper provides a new data set of regional income inequalities within countries based on satellite nighttime light data. We first empirically study the relationship between luminosity data and regional incomes for those countries where regional income data are available. We subsequently use...

Using a dynamic factor model that allows for changes in both the long-run growth rate of output and the volatility of business cycles, we document a significant decline in long-run output growth in the United States. Our evidence supports the view that most of this slowdown occurred prior to the...

In the last few decades there has been little convergence of income levels in Latin America with those in the United States, in sharp contrast with both emerging Asia and emerging Europe. This paper argues that lack of convergence was not the result of low investment. Latin America is poorer...