We examine the dynamic impact of household borrowing on the trade balance using data from 33 developing countries and 36 developed countries over the 1980-2017 period. Our findings suggest that the impact of household borrowing on the trade balance is by and large negative, both in the short and...

Conventional wisdom suggests that marginal damages from particulate matter pollution are high in less-developed countries because they are highly polluted. Using administrative data on the universe of births and deaths, we explore birthweight and mortality effects of gestational particulate...

Why are average hours worked per adult lower in rich countries than in poor countries? We consider two natural explanations: income effects in preferences, in which leisure becomes more valuable when income rises, and distortionary tax systems, which are more prevalent in richer countries. To...

This paper documents a positive relationship between labor-friendly institutions and investment in industrial robots in a sample of advanced economies. Institutions explain a substantial proportion of cross-country variation in automation. The relationship between institutions and robots is...

Interest-rate spreads fluctuate widely across time and countries. We characterize their behavior using some 3,200 quarterly observations for 21 advanced and 17 emerging economies since the early 1990s. Before the financial crisis, spreads are 10 times more volatile in emerging economies than in...

Status considerations with respect to consumption give rise to negative externalities because individuals do not take into account that their decisions affect the relative consumption position of others. Further, status concerns create incentives for excessive labour supply in competitive...

Over the last decades, hours worked per capita have declined substantially in many OECD economies. Using a neoclassical growth model with endogenous work-leisure choice, we assess the role of trend growth slowdown in accounting for the decline in hours worked. In the model, a permanent reduction...

The vast literature on earnings inequality has so far largely ignored the role played by hours of work. This paper argues that in order to understand earnings dispersion we need to consider not only the dispersion of hourly wages but also inequality in hours worked as well as the correlation...

Declining hours of work per worker in conjunction with a growing work force may give rise to fluctuations between growth regimes. This is shown in an overlapping generations model with two-period lived individuals endowed with Boppart-Krusell preferences (Boppart and Krusell (2020)). On the...

We use a spatial general equilibrium model with potential commuting of workers between their place of work and their place of residence to analyze the effects of rush hours on the spatial allocation of employment and population, average labor productivity and the housing market. Abolishing...