We examine the relationship between immigration and attitudes toward redistribution using a newly assembled data set of immigrant stocks for 140 regions of 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native...

We argue that migrants played a significant role in the diffusion of the demographic transition from France to the rest of Europe in the late 19th century. Employing novel data on French immigration from other European regions from 1850 to 1930, we find that higher immigration to France...

This paper compares different solution methods for computing the equilibrium of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models with rare disasters along the line of those proposed by Rietz (1988), Barro (2006}, Gabaix (2012), and Gourio (2012). DSGE models with rare disasters require...

A safe asset's real value is insulated from shocks, including declines in GDP from rare macroeconomic disasters. However, in a Lucas-tree world, the aggregate risk is given by the process for GDP and cannot be altered by the creation of safe assets. Therefore, in the equilibrium of a...

We study the distributional effects of asset returns using a heterogeneous-agent model estimated to match the joint distribution of wealth and returns. In the model, endogenous portfolio decisions play a key role through their impact on households' wealth accumulation. We find substantial...

In the U.S., some sectoral evidence suggests that growth is driven mainly by productivity enhancing reallocation. In countries with greater barriers to entry and imperfect competition, the reallocation process may be inefficient. Therefore, for developing countries, an open question is whether...

We use administrative data to examine medium and long-term formal education and labor market impacts among participants and family members of a randomized vocational training program for disadvantaged youth in Colombia. In the Colombian program, vocational training and formal education are...

We use plant output and input prices to decompose the profit margin into four parts: productivity, demand shocks, mark-ups and input costs. We find that each of these market fundamentals are important in explaining plant exit. We then use variation across sectors in tariff changes after the...

This paper presents a tractable formalization and an empirical investigation of the quality-complementarity hypothesis, the hypothesis that input quality and plant productivity are complementary in generating output quality. We embed this complementarity in a general-equilibrium trade model with...

We use a panel of manufacturing plants from Colombia to analyze how the rise in payroll tax rates over the 1980s and 1990s affected the labor market. Our estimates indicate that formal wages fall by between 1.4% and 2.3% as a result of a 10% rise in payroll taxes. This "less-than-full-shifting"...