Openness to international competition can lead to enhanced resource allocation in the end. While factor reallocation is essential if net benefits are to be derived from trade liberalization, the process generates costs both for transitioning workers and for employers undergoing personnel...

Openness to international competition can lead to enhanced resource allocation in the long-run. While factor reallocation is essential if net benefits are to be derived from trade liberalization, the process generates costs both for transitioning workers and for employers undergoing personnel...

We use a panel of manufacturing plants from Colombia to analyze how the rise in payroll tax rates over the 1980’s and 1990’s 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...

In the 1980s the composition of immigrants to the U.S. shifted towards less-skilled workers. Around this time, real wages and employment of younger and lesseducated U.S. workers fell. Some blame recent immigration shifts for the misfortunes of unskilled workers in the U.S. OLS estimates using...

We use plant output and input prices to decompose the profit margin into four potential determinants of plant exit: productivity, demand shocks, mark-ups and input costs. We find that each of these market fundamentals are indeed important in explaining plant exit. Then, we use differences across...

We examine various channels through which trade liberalization affects aggregate productivity, exploiting tariff changes across sectors after the Colombian trade reform. An advantage of our analysis is that our TFP measure does not include demand and price effects. We find that higher...

Online appendix for the Review of Economic Dynamics article

Using data from a representative sample from India, we test the empirical validity of Quantity-Quality tarde-off model of Becker and Lewis (1973). To address the endogeneity arising from the joint determination of quantity and quality of children by parents, we instrument the family size by sex...

<Para ID="Par1">Unemployment increased drastically over the course of the Great Recession from 4.5 percent prior to the recession to 10 percent at its peak in October 2009. Since then, the unemployment rate has come down steadily, and it stood at 5.8 percent in November 2014. Based on existing analyses and some...</para>