Emerging economies have high shares of self-employed individuals running owner-only firms who, in contrast to many salaried firms, have little access to formal financing and therefore rely on informal financing (input credit) from other firms. We build a small open economy real business cycle...

This paper analyzes the effects of the labor market reforms launched in the early 1980s by the Conservative government led by Mrs. Thatcher. It is argued that the increase in the growth of labor productivity in manufacturing after 1980 as well as the improvement in the responsiveness of...

We analyze the impact on productivity in advanced economies of fast-growing trade with China between the mid-1990s and late-2000s, separately identifying the export and import channels. We use country-sector-level data for 18 advanced economies and, similar to Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013),...

Spain's structural reforms, implemented around 2012, have arguably contributed to a faster and stronger economic recovery. In particular, there is strong evidence that the 2012 labor market reforms increased wage flexibility, which helped the Spanish economy to regain competitiveness and create...

Using the U.S. Current Population Survey data, this paper compares the distributional impacts of the Pandemic Crisis and those of the Global Financial Crisis in terms of (i) worker characteristics, (ii) job characteristics-'social' (where individuals interact to consume goods), 'teleworkable'...

Raising South Africa's low employment rate to levels seen in emerging market or advanced economy peers could raise GDP per capita by 50 to 60 percent and reduce income inequality dramatically in the long term. By putting further strain on an already fragile labor market, Covid-19 has raised the...

We document the short-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Brazilian labor market focusing on employment, wages and hours worked using the nationally representative household surveys PNAD-Continua and PNAD COVID. Sectors most susceptible to the shock because they are more...

I use three decades of county-level data to estimate the effects of federal unemployment benefit extensions on economic activity. To overcome the reverse causality coming from the fact that benefit extensions are a function of state unemployment rates, I only use the within-state variation in...

The "Great Trade Collapse" triggered by the 2008-09 crisis calls for a careful assessment of the trade losses from financial crises. We adopt a more detailed perspective by looking at the response of different types of trade (i.e. agricultural, mining, and manufactured goods, and services)...