While the world is focused on addressing the near-term ramifications of the COVID-19 shock, we turn attention to another important aspect of the pandemic: its fallout on medium-term potential output through scarring. Taking Australia and New Zealand as examples, we show that the pandemic will...

The typical size distribution of manufacturing plants in developing countries has a thick left tail compared to developed countries. The same holds across Indian states, with richer states having a much smaller share of their manufacturing employment in small plants. In this paper, I explore the...

We use the novel anonymized Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS) microdata to analyze job finding rates and job separation rates in New Zealand. We find that individual characteristics, including age, gender, ethnicity and education have a significant impact on job finding and separation rates,...

This paper estimates the scarring effect of recessions on corporates’ investment and how it is amplified by the level of corporate debt. Our results suggest that the effect of firms’ debt in shaping the response of investment to recessions is statistically significant and economically...

Do structural reforms that aim to boost potential output also change the distribution of income? We shed light on this question by looking at the broad patterns in the cross-country data covering advanced, emerging-market, and low-income countries. Our main finding is that there is indeed...

This paper analyzes the determinants of high unemployment in South Africa by studying labor market dynamics using individual level panel data from the Quarterly Labor Force Survey. While prior work experience and gender are found to be important determinants of the job-finding rate, education...

This paper empirically examines the economic effects of COVID-19 vaccine rollouts using a cross-country daily database of vaccinations and high frequency indicators of economic activity—nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions, carbon monoxide (CO) emissions, and Google mobility indices—for a sample...

This paper examines empirically the determinants of COVID-19 vaccine rollouts and their effects on health outcomes. We assemble a comprehensive and novel cross-country database at a daily frequency on vaccinations and various health outcomes (new COVID-19 cases, fatalities, intensive care unit...

This paper considers the implications for developing countries of a new wave of technological change that substitutes pervasively for labor. It makes simple and plausible assumptions: the AI revolution can be modeled as an increase in productivity of a distinct type of capital that substitutes...

Sub-Saharan Africa has been marred by conflicts during the past several decades. While the intensity of conflicts in recent years is lower than that observed in the 1990s, the region remains prone to conflicts, with around 30 percent of the countries affected in 2019. In addition to immeasurable...