Using variation in minimum wages across cities and controlling for differences in business-cycle factors and long-run local economic trends, we find that following minimum wage increases, both prices and nominal spending rise modestly. These gains are larger for certain sub-categories of goods...

The stochastic process for earnings is the key element of incomplete markets models in modern quantitative macroeconomics. We show that a simple modification of the canonical process used in the literature leads to a dramatic improvement in the measurement of earnings dynamics in administrative...

Post-crisis stress tests have altered banks' credit supply to small business. Banks affected by stress tests reduce credit supply and raise interest rates on small business loans. Banks price the implied increase in capital requirements from stress tests where they have local knowledge, and exit...

We study the impact of FDI on the productivity of host-country firms. FDI has positive spillovers only when foreign and domestic firms use similar technologies. Channeling FDI to sectors where firms share similar technology would significantly increase productivity spillovers from FDI. We show...

We measure the amount of smoothing achieved through various components of the government deficit in EU and OECD countries. For EU countries, at the 1-year frequency percent of shocks to GDP are smoothed via government consumption, 18 percent via transfers percent via subsidies, while taxes...

We estimate channels of international risk sharing between European Monetary Union (EMU), European Union, and other OECD countries 1992-2007. We focus on risk sharing through savings, factor income flows, and capital gains. Risk sharing through factor income and capital gains was close to zero...

We study capital misallocation within and across 10 African countries using the World Bank Enterprise Surveys. First, we compare the extent of misallocation among firms within countries. We document high variation in firms' marginal product of capital (MPK), implying that countries could produce...

We present new stylized facts on bank and firm leverage for 2000-2009 using extensive internationally comparable micro level data from several countries. The main result is that there was very little buildup in leverage for the average non-financial firm and commercial bank before the crisis,...

Using a variance decomposition of shocks to GDP, we quantify the role of international factor income, international transfers, and saving in achieving risk sharing during the recent European crisis. We focus on the sub-periods 1990-2007, 2008-2009, and 2010 and consider separately the European...

We revisit the relationship between foreign investment and productivity of acquired firms. First, we construct a panel firm-level dataset for eight advanced European countries covering domestic and foreign acquisitions together with detailed balance sheet information for the years 1999{2012....