This paper examines the extent to which the destination of exports matters for the input prices paid by firms, using detailed customs and firm-product-level data from Portugal. We use exchange-rate movements as a source of variation in export destinations and find that exporting to richer...

We date turning points of the reference cycle for 19 Mediterranean countries and analyze their structure and interdependencies. Fluctuations are volatile and not highly correlated across countries; recessions are deep but asynchronous, the distribution of output losses in recessions spread out....

The use of payment cards, either debit or credit, is becoming more and more widespread in developed economies. Nevertheless, the use of cash remains significant. We hypothesize that the lack of card acceptance at the point of sale is a key reason why cash continues to play an important role. We...

Starting from the dynamic factor model for non-stationary data we derive the factor-augmented error correction model (FECM) and, by generalizing the Granger representation theorem, its moving-average representation. The latter is used for the identification of structural shocks and their...

In the face of trade liberalization domestic firms are often forced out of the market, whereas others adapt and survive. In this paper we focus on a new channel of adaptation, namely the shift toward increased provision of services in lieu of goods production. We exploit variation in EU trade...

We consider an economy where competing political parties alternate in office. Due to rent-seeking motives, incumbents have an incentive to set public expenditures above the socially optimum level. Parties cannot commit to future policies, but they can forge a political compromise where each...

We provide direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We exploit a unique feature of housing markets in the U.K. and Singapore, where residential property ownership takes the form of either...

We empirically analyze the nature of returns to scale in active mutual fund management. We find strong evidence of decreasing returns at the industry level: As the size of the active mutual fund industry increases, a fund's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. At the fund level,...

We study the impact of regional and sectoral productivity changes on the U.S. economy. To that end, we consider an environment that captures the effects of interregional and intersectoral trade in propagating disaggregated productivity changes at the level of a sector in a given U.S. state to...

In this paper we contribute to the analysis of the assimilation process of migrants by analyzing the extent to which friendship with natives can be seen as a measure of cultural assimilation and investigating the formation of social ties in the host country. Using novel information from the...