This paper studies monetary policy transmission through BigTech and traditional banks. By comparing business loans made by a BigTech bank with those made by traditional banks, it finds that BigTech credit amplifies monetary policy transmission mainly through the extensive margin. Specifically,...

We analyze media repression in Putin’s Russia (2004–2019), a smart dictatorship that mimics democratic institutions, notably relatively free elections, and a relatively free press. Drawing on a unique granular dataset on journalist harassment and the pre-determined, staggered timing of local...

Highly interconnected global supply chains make countries vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. This paper estimates the macroeconomic effects of global supply chain shocks for the euro area. Our empirical model combines business cycle variables with data from international container trade....

We examine the effect of regional favoritism on the access of firms to credit. Using firm-level data on a large sample of 29,000 firms covering 47 countries, we investigate the hypothesis that firms in the birth regions of national political leaders have better access to credit. Our evidence...

In China, the relative wages of high-skilled and low-skilled workers display huge variation across different regions. We examine whether financial intermediation development can explain such variation. Conceptually, better-developed financial intermediation helps financially-constrained firms...

This paper studies the origins and consequences of the Russian mafia (vory-v-zakone). I web scraped a unique dataset that contains detailed biographies of more than 5,000 mafia leaders operating in 15 countries of the (former) Soviet Union at some point between 1916 and 2017. Using this data, I...

Is bank- versus market-based financing different in its attitudes towards Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) risk? Using a novel sample covering 3,783 U.S. public firms from 2007 to 2020, we study how firm-level ESG risk affects its financing outcomes. We find that companies with higher...

This paper investigates how the sector-specific source or the changing sectoral composition of labor productivity has contributed to β-convergence, using a newly constructed eight-sector database. The main findings are twofold. First, both within and sectoral reallocation have become important...

To analyze whether the occurrence of elections affects access to credit for firms, we perform an investigation using firm-level data covering 44 developed and developing countries. The results show that elections impair access to credit. Specifically, firms are more credit-constrained in...

We investigate the relationship between oil windfalls and income inequality using the subnational data of one of the resource-richest and most unequal countries in the world – Russia. While previous literature produced contradictory findings due to the use of an aggregate measure of oil rents...