This paper examines trade participation and innovation activities and how they are intertwined in the Middle East and North Africa region. While the level of trade participation of firms in the region is similar to other peer economies, innovation rates are particularly low. Many productive...

The pandemic triggered a large, lasting shift to work from home (WFH). To study this shift, we survey full-time workers who finished primary school in 27 countries as of mid-2021 and early 2022. Our cross-country comparisons control for age, gender, education, and industry and treat the U.S....

This paper sheds light on the effectiveness of policies addressing high non-performing loans (NPLs). Using data on ownership of subsidiaries of foreign banks in Emerging Europe, we first show that changes in NPLs of parent banks are associated with changes in NPLs of their foreign affiliates,...

Does state ownership hinder or help firms access credit? We use data on almost 4 million firms in 89 countries to study the relationship between state ownership and corporate leverage. Controlling for country-sector-year fixed effects and conventional firm-level determinants of leverage, we show...

This paper sheds light on the effectiveness of policies addressing high non-performing loans (NPLs). Using data on ownership of subsidiaries of foreign banks in Emerging Europe, we first show that changes in NPLs of parent banks are associated with changes in NPLs of their foreign affiliates,...

In this paper, we present theory and global evidence on how mobile internet access affects desire and plans to emigrate. Our theory predicts that mobile internet access increases desire and plans to emigrate. Our empirical analysis combines survey data on 606,827 individuals from 2,107...

We study basic information treatments regarding sexual orientation using randomized experiments in three countries with strong and widespread anti-gay attitudes: Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine. Participants who received information about the economic costs to society of sexual-orientation...

We exploit an extensive database on more than 32,000 greenfield projects over 2003-2020 to examine how the composition of greenfield FDI inflows into the EBRD regions has changed over time, and what this implies for employment generation, inequality and spatial disparities. Our results suggest...

We review the debate on the association of financial globalization with inequality. We show that the within country distributional impact of capital account liberalization is context specific and that different types of flows have different distributional effects. Their overall impact depends on...

This paper traces the relationship between quarterly estimates of economic activity and people's mobility during the Covid-19 crisis in a sample of 53 economies. Over time, the estimates of elasticity of value added with respect to mobility have been declining, to around 20 percent at the start...