This paper documents the extent and characteristics of plants and firms in the US that are outside the manufacturing sector according to official government statistics but nonetheless are heavily involved in activities related to the production of manufactured goods. Using new data on...

Two otherwise identical firms that enter the same market in different months, one in January and one in December, will report dramatically different annual sales for the first calendar year of operations. This partial year effect in annual data leads to downward biased observations of the level...

This paper examines the factors that give rise to intermediaries in exporting and explores the implications for trade volumes. Export intermediaries such as wholesalers serve different markets and export different products than manufacturing exporters. In particular, high market-specific fixed...

This paper examines the importance of buyer-supplier relationships, geography and the structure of the production network in firm performance. We develop a simple model where firms can outsource tasks and search for suppliers in different locations. Low search and outsourcing costs lead firms to...

We provide evidence on the real effects of credit supply shocks utilizing a new firm-level database from six Latin American countries between 1990 to 2005. Holding creditworthiness constant through foreign currency debt exposure, we compare investment undertaken by domestic exporters to that of...

We quantify the causal effect of foreign investment on total factor productivity (tfp) using a new global firm-level database. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting the difference in the amount of foreign investment by financial and industrial investors and simultaneously controlling...

We investigate the relationship between financial integration and output volatility at micro and macro levels. Using a very large firm-level dataset (AMADEUS) from 16 European countries, we construct a measure of ``deep'' financial integration at the regional level based on observations of...

Standard theory predicts that financial integration leads to a lower degree of business cycle synchronization. Surprisingly, cross-country studies find the opposite. Our contribution is to document the theoretically predicted negative effect of financial integration on business cycle...