In Latin America--the world's most unequal region--non-white rural populations disproportionately suffer from Chagas disease, a neglected tropical disease (NTD) that causes weeks of acute symptoms and can lead to chronic heart problems decades later. We demonstrate that Brazil's post-1983...

Top income inequality in the United States has increased considerably within occupations. This phenomenon has led to a search for a common explanation. We instead develop a theory where increases in income inequality originating within a few occupations can "spill over" through consumption into...

We propose a novel channel through which rising income inequality affects job creation and macroeconomic outcomes. High-income households save relatively more in stocks and bonds but less in bank deposits. A rising top income share thereby increases the relative financing cost for bank-dependent...

China's financial system has been integral to its spectacular economic growth over the past 40 years. We review the recent literature on China's financial system and its connections to the Chinese economy based on the categories of Aggregate Financing to the Real Economy (AFRE), a broad measure...

Consider an economy in which agents face income risk but interact in a stochastic financial network where the randomness is dictated by both chance and choice. We study the financial centrality of an agent defined as the ex-ante marginal social value of providing a small liquid asset to that...

Standard theory implies that the discount rates used by firms in investment decisions (i.e., their required returns to capital) determine investment and transmit financial shocks to the real economy. However, there exists little evidence on how firms' discount rates change over time and affect...

In most countries, suppliers of intermediate goods and services are also the main providers of short-term financing to firms. This paper studies the macroeconomic implications of these financial links. In our model, trade credit is the outcome of a long-term contract between firms linked in the...

We use unique firm-level data from Mexico to document that non-financial corporations engage in carry trades by borrowing in foreign currency (FX) and lending in domestic currency, largely in the form of trade credit, accumulating currency risk in the process. We show at a quarterly frequency...

Education is a crucial asset for a country's economic prospects and for its inhabitants. In addition to its direct impact on growth via the accumulation of human capital, it is a critical ingredient in producing an informed citizenry, enhancing their ability to obtain and exert human and...

Household surveys suffer from persistent and growing underreporting. We propose a novel procedure to adjust reported survey incomes for underreporting by estimating a model of misreporting whose main parameter of interest is the elasticity of regional national accounts income to regional survey...