Can government agencies in sanctioning countries deter their companies from violating laws that limit business transactions with sanctioned countries? To understand this issue, we study the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is the primary enforcer of sanctions in the United States....

Banks are multidivisional organizations in which branches hold local knowledge about borrowers. Can this "soft" information be transmitted across units? Studying the population of corporate loans originated by a large commercial bank in China from 2010 to 2020, we find that when firms switch...

Chinese private portfolio equity outflows, though small compared to other Chinese outflows, are growing rapidly because of capital account liberalization and capital flight. Using granular stock-holding data on Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor (QDII) mutual funds, we identify a nascent...

How effective are trade sanctions? We study the unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia following February 2022, when Western countries banned exports accounting for 36% of Russia's prewar import value. Combining novel, hand-collected records of these sanctions with Russian customs data, firm...

Demand for skilled labor and social status accorded by educational achievements induce a race to acquire education, dubbed "education fever". In conjunction with credit market constraints and in the context of quantityquality tradeoff, this, in turn, may reduce fertility, especially in...

The study aims to identify economic measures that enhance support for climate change mitigation, particularly in oil-rich communities. Using US county-level data, the research shows that the presence of oil reserves is negatively associated with the attribution of human influence to climate...

We examine impact of economic sanctions on Russian import prices using detailed data on other countries’ exports to Russia. We find that unit import prices of goods sanctioned by trading blocs such as the European Union have increased, often drastically, and even when imported to Russia from...

Although it has been speculated that the pain and dislocation of the early 1990s left Russians with an abiding distaste for the values that animated the transition from communism, the quantitative evidence for a lasting effect is thin. Drawing on a large, regionally representative survey from...

This study introduces a novel composite approach to nonlinear inflation dynamics in identifying historical inflation patterns and forecasting future regime shifts. Assuming inflation's responsiveness to its determinants varies across inflation regimes and that inflation shock magnitude shapes...

The paper investigates the influence of creditor rights reforms on leverage. Based on a partial equilibrium agency cost model, we propose a novel channel running from the owner/manager's private bankruptcy costs to leverage. Such costs mitigate the firms' agency problem toward creditors, thereby...