The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a serious threat to the survival of Japanese firms, highlighting the importance of understanding how and why firms exit. In this paper, we use a rich firm-level dataset of Japanese firms to document how firm exit patterns have evolved between 2007 and 2017. Firm...

Nonviable 'zombie' firms have become a key concern in China. Using novel firm-level industrial survey data, this paper illustrates the central role of zombies and their strong linkages with state owned enterprises (SOEs) in contributing to debt vulnerabilities and low productivity. As a group,...

This paper presents estimates of the carbon emissions of FDI from capital formation funded by FDI and the production of foreign-controlled firms. The carbon intensity of capital formation financed by FDI has trended down, driven by reductions in the carbon intensity of electricity generation....

The real effective exchange rate is an aggregation of several bilateral real exchange rates with respect to other countries. The aggregation is usually done under the assumption of constant elasticity of substitution (CES) between products from different countries. We investigate the validity of...

This paper uses granular customs data from France to investigate propagation of the COVID-19 shock along the supply chains in 2020. It quantifies the effect of the COVID-19 shock on trade adjustment and identifies mitigating and amplifying factors contributing to French firms’ heterogeneous...

A lack of timely financing for purchases of vaccines and other health products impeded the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on analysis of contract signature and delivery dates in COVID-19 vaccine advance purchase agreements, this paper finds that 60-75 percent of the delay in...

Pandemics and epidemics pose risks to lives, societies, and economies, and their frequency is expected to increase as rising trade and increased human interaction with animals leads to the emergence of new diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic teaches us that we can and must be better prepared, with...

Product scope adjustment is a key mechanism through which multi-product firms achieve efficient resource allocations. In this paper, we take a novel perspective to study firms' product scope adjustment behavior through the lens of asset pricing. Using a unique panel scanner data set containing...

We examine the extent to which regulations of entry and credit access are related to competition using data on 28 manufacturing sectors across 64 countries. A robust finding is that bureaucratic and costly entry regulations tend to hamper competition, as proxied by the price-cost margin, in the...

This paper develops a framework for the quantitative analysis of individual income dynamics, mobility and welfare. Individual income is assumed to follow a stochastic process with two (unobserved) components, an i.i.d. component representing measurement error or transitory income shocks and an...