We use Belgian data with information on domestic firm-to-firm sales and foreign trade transactions to study how international trade affects firms' unit cost and the consumer's real wage. We show theoretically that the gains from trade depend on domestic firm-to-firm linkages. Furthermore, we...

This paper quantifies the origins of firm size heterogeneity when firms are interconnected in a production network. Using the universe of buyer-supplier relationships in Belgium, the paper develops a set of stylized facts that motivate a model in which firms buy inputs from upstream suppliers...

We study how increased import competition affects the evolution of firm-product technical efficiencies in the small open economy of Belgium. We observe quarterly firm-product data at the 8-digit level on quantities sold and firm-level labor, capital, and intermediate inputs from 1997 to 2007, a...

Measures of economic uncertainty are countercyclical, but economic theory does not provide definite guidance on the direction of causation between uncertainty and the business cycle. This paper proposes a new multi-country approach to the analysis of the interaction between uncertainty and...

This paper develops a threshold-augmented dynamic multi-country model (TGVAR) to quantify the macroeconomic effects of Covid-19. We show that there exist threshold effects in the relationship between output growth and excess global volatility at individual country levels in a significant...

This paper considers a modification of the standard Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model of epidemic that allows for different degrees of compulsory as well as voluntary social distancing. It is shown that the fraction of population that self-isolates varies with the perceived probability...

We study the long-term impact of climate change on economic activity across countries, using a stochastic growth model where labour productivity is affected by country-specific climate variables—defined as deviations of temperature and precipitation from their historical norms. Using a panel...

The potential for portfolio diversification is driven broadly by two characteristics: the degree to which systematic risk factors are correlated with each other and the degree of dependence individual firms have to the different types of risk factors. Using a global vector autoregressive...