We examine the impacts of both domestic and international financial market development on R&D intensities in 22 manufacturing industries in 18 OECD countries for the period 1990- 2003. We take account of such industry characteristics as the need for external financing and the amount of tangible...

I show in this paper that incomplete contracts affect a firm's decision about serving foreign customers through exports or local sales from an affiliated plant. When contracts between two agents within a firm are too costly to write, the share of multinational firms may be higher or lower...

We build a heterogeneous-firms model with firm-specific wages and credit frictions to study the role of financial development for inequality in the global economy. If there are many small firms, better access to external funds reduces wage inequality and unemployment. In contrast, if there are...

We use a spatial general equilibrium model with potential commuting of workers between their place of work and their place of residence to analyze the effects of rush hours on the spatial allocation of employment and population, average labor productivity and the housing market. Abolishing...

We use a quantitative model to study the implications of European integration for welfare and migration flows across 1,318 regions. The model suggests that an increase of trade barriers to the level of 1957 reduces welfare by about 1-2 percent on average, depending on the presumed trade...

Using a natural experiment from Germany, we show that temporary place-based subsidies generate persistent effects on economic density. We identify employment and capital formation as main channels for higher income per square kilometer. As the spatial regression discontinuity design allows us to...

We estimate the spatially differential effects of a nationally uniform minimum wage that was introduced in Germany in 2015. To this end, we use a micro data set covering the universe of employed and unemployed individuals in Germany from 2011 to 2016 and a difference‐in‐differences based...

Many countries operate pronounced fiscal equalization schemes that shift tax revenue across jurisdictions. We use a general equilibrium model with multiple asymmetric regions, costly trade and labor mobility to carve out the aggregate implications of this policy. Calibrating the model for...

In contrast to what several papers have argued recently, we show that firm heterogeneity fosters agglomeration of economic activity. If firms are more similar with respect to their total factor productivity, each company faces a lower propensity to export. This renders the home market more...

We develop a heterogeneous-firms model with trade in goods, labor mobility and credit constraints due to moral hazard. Mitigating financial frictions reduces the incentive of high-skilled workers to migrate to one region such that an unequal distribution of industrial activity becomes less...