The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of targeted financial development on aggregate outcomes, in particular aggregate productivity. The development of the both the bond market and the banking sector can increase aggregate productivity through intra-industry reallocation of...

Bilateral, product-level data exhibit a number of strong patterns that can be used to evaluate international trade theories, notably the spatial incidence of "export zeros" (correlated with distance and importer size), and of export unit values (positively related to distance). We show that...

This paper studies the export decision of risk-averse firms in a model featuring aggregate uncertainty and no capital markets. Firms seeking to enter the foreign market face a sunk cost as well as a fixed participation cost every period they export. Using a calibrated version of the model, I...