We partnered with a micro-lender in Mali to randomize credit offers at the village level. Then, in no-loan control villages, we gave cash grants to randomly selected households. These grants led to higher agricultural investments and profits, thus showing that liquidity constraints bind with...

In 1998 Hungary embarked on a course of comprehensive pension reform. The reforms are likely to change the distribution of incomes of future generations. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. From a policy point of view, we analyse poverty and income inequality among pensioners in Hungary...

Copulas offer financial risk managers a powerful tool to model the dependence between the different elements of a portfolio and are preferable to the traditional, correlation-based approach. In this paper we show the importance of selecting an accurate copula for risk management. We extend...

Transferring low tech manufacturing jobs to cheap labour countries is often seen by part of the general public and policy makers as a step into the de-industrialisation of the European economies. However, several recent contributions have shown that the effects on home economies are rarely...

Foreign activities of MNEs have important effects on home economies. The debate is ambiguous: concerns that foreign investments deplete domestic economies are often coupled with the pride for doing good business in foreign countries. This Paper addresses this question by defining the appropriate...

Large multi-product firms dominate international trade flows. This paper documents new facts about multi-product manufacturing exporters that are not easily reconciled with existing multi-product models. Using novel linked production and export data at the firm-product level, we find that the...

We present a new model of multi-product firms (MPFs) and flexible manufacturing and explore its implications in partial and general equilibrium. International trade integration affects the scale and scope of MPFs through a competition effect and a demand effect. We demonstrate how MPFs adjust in...

We develop a new model of multi-product firms which invest to improve both the quality of their individual products and of their brand. Because of flexible manufacturing, products closer to firms' core competence have lower costs, so they produce more of them, and also have higher incentives to...

We build a theoretical model of multi-product firms that highlights how market size and geography (the market sizes of and bilateral economic distances to trading partners) affect both a firm's exported product range and its exported product mix across market destinations (the distribution of...

This paper investigates whether the diversity of activities conducted by financial institutions influences their market valuations. We find that there is a diversification discount: The market values financial conglomerates that engage in multiple activities, e.g., lending and non-lending...