The current pattern of sudden stops and financial crises in emerging markets has great resonance to events in the first era of globalization, from 1870-1913. In this paper I present descriptive statistics on capital flows, current account reversals and financial crises during the period...

We causally identify the implications of relaxing the Supplementary Leverage Ratio in April 2020 for bank balance sheet composition and credit provision. Our findings suggest that this risk-invariant leverage ratio was binding for banks, weakly affected bank liquidity provision in Treasury...

The current level and form of subsidization of college education is often rationalized by appeal to capital constraints on individuals. Because borrowing against human capital is difficult, capital constraints can lead to nonoptimal outcomes unless government intervenes. We develop a simple...

Accessing external finance for innovation is notoriously difficult. We study the effect of financial constraints on the probability of conducting process innovation, while also considering the role of past innovating experience. Theoretically, we show a firm’s optimal process innovation...

Income differences across countries primarily reflect differences in total factor productivity (TFP). More disaggregated data show that the TFP gap between rich and poor countries varies systematically across industrial sectors of the economy: Poor countries are particularly unproductive in...

Growing evidence suggests that a large share of international trade transactions are made through intermediaries and that whether firms use them or not depends on different factors. In this paper, we investigate whether credit constraints introduce a degree of difference among firms in their...

The sensitivity of employment and real wages -- hence aggregate labor income to short-run fluctuations in output varies across countries. We develop a simple theoretical model to show that, if workers, but not capitalists, are liquidity constrained, the sensitivity of an economy to exogenous...

I estimate the effects of the Federal Reserve's forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases, along with the effects of interest rate changes under conventional policy, on the U.S. equity market, and assess the reasons for stock price responses. Although the overall stock market respond...

We compare the performance of markets and tournaments as allocative mechanisms in an economy with borrowing constraints. The model consists of a continuum of individuals who differ in their initial wealth and ability level (e.g. students) and that are to be assigned to a continuum of investment...