This paper provides novel evidence on the impact of changes in energy prices on manufacturing performance in two large developing economies-Indonesia and Mexico. It finds that unlike increases in electricity prices, which harm plants' performance, fuel price hikes result in higher productivity...

This paper uses a panel of firms from the Mexican Economic Censuses and analyzes at the microeconomic level how labor markets adapt to the adoption of information and communication technologies. The paper studies the effects of the adoption of information and communication technologies over the...

We examine the impact of changes in local labor market concentration on two components of income inequality in Mexico: local wage shares and labor income inequality. Combining data from the Economic Census and the Population and Housing Censuses, we analyze the mechanisms that drive the...

Policymakers often test expensive new programs on relatively small samples. Formally incorporating informative Bayesian priors into impact evaluation offers the promise to learn more from these experiments. A Colombian government program which aimed to increase exporting was trialed...

This paper uses a unique data set that captures the elimination of subnational regulatory barriers to firm entry and competition across 1,800 municipalities and matches it with establishment census panel data to estimate the impact on establishment productivity and markups. The elimination of...

Bangladesh has made notable developmental progress over the past two decades. Economic growth has been among the top 10 percent globally, and poverty has been reduced by 80 percent over the same period. Exports also saw a dramatic jump from US 6.5 billion dollars in 2000 to US 57.5 billion...

This paper assesses the impact of favoritism in public procurement on private sector productivity growth. To this end, it combines three novel microeconomic data sets: administrative data on firms, including more than 4 million firm-year observations and rich financial and ownership information;...

Are firms adapting to climate change? This paper studies this question by combining geocoded World Bank Enterprise Survey data with spatially granular weather data to estimate temperature response functions for nearly 160,000 firms in 134 countries over a 15-year period. Our results show that...

The European Commission's "NextGenerationEU" COVID-19 recovery package has underscored interest in the size of regional fiscal multipliers in Europe. While the objective of these funds is the long-term transformation toward more sustainable green growth and digitalization in EU economies,...

This paper presents a simple model with financial frictions where inflation increases the cost faced by firms holding liquid assets to hedge risky production against expenditure shocks. Inflation tilts firms' technology choice away from innovative activities and toward safer but return-dominated...