Data on the stock of sovereign debt are typically presented at "face value", defined as the undiscounted sum of future principal repayments. This measure has some obvious problems. As it includes only principal repayments, it can give a misleading depiction of relative indebtedness levels, and...

We use Portuguese firm-level data to investigate whether changes in resource misallocation may have contributed to the poor economic performance of some southern and peripheral European countries leading up to the Eurozone crisis. We extend Hsieh and Klenow's (2009) methodology to include...

In this paper we investigate what happens to firms after they default on their bank loans. We approach this question by establishing a set of stylized facts concerning the evolution of default and its resolution, focusing on access to credit after default. Using a unique dataset from Portugal,...

From the end of the SecondWorldWar to the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, per-capita GDP in the economies of East Asia grew almost three times as fast as in the economies of Latin America. Specifically, in 1950, the economies of the Asian Tigers (Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan)...

We develop a macroeconomic model with physical and human capital, human capital risk, and limited contract enforcement. We show analytically that young (high-return) households are the most exposed to human capital risk and are also the least insured. We document this risk-insurance pattern in...

Output falls during emerging market financial crises are large. These declines are not explained by declines in the supply of factors of production, and are hence measured as declines in total factor productivity. Why does productivity decline during a crisis? This paper uses establishment level...

Financial crises in emerging market countries appear to be very costly: output falls are often dramatic, while a host of partial welfare indicators deteriorate as well. The magnitude of the decline in output is puzzling from an accounting perspective, as factor usage does not decline as much as...