Research

A Universal Basic Income (UBI) is often seen as an attractive policy option to replace existing targeted transfer and subsidy programs. However, in a budget-neutral switch to a UBI there is a trade-off between the generosity of the universal transfer, and hence its poverty impact, and the implied increase in tax burden. We summarize our results for fourteen low- and middle-income countries. We find that, with the exception of Russia, a poverty reducing, budget-neutral UBI would entail a significant increase in the net tax burden of top deciles. The efficiency cost and political resistance for such a policy would likely be too high.

We examine the employment effects of 3G mobile internet expansion in developing countries. We find that 3G significantly increases the labor force participation rate of women and the employment rates of both men and women. Our results suggest that 3G affects the type of jobs and there is a distinct gender dimension to these effects. Men transition away from unpaid agricultural work into operating small agricultural enterprises, while women take more unpaid jobs, especially in agriculture, and operate more small businesses in all sectors. Both men and women are more likely to work in wage jobs in the service sector.

This paper studies the role of private sector companies in the development of local amenities. We use evidence from one of the largest multinationals of the 20th century: the United Fruit Company (UFCo). The firm was given a large land concession in Costa Rica—one of the so‐called “Banana Republics”—from 1899 to 1984. Using administrative census data with census‐block geo‐references from 1973 to 2011, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity design that exploits a land assignment that is orthogonal to our outcomes of interest. We find that the firm had a positive and persistent effect on living standards. Company documents explain that a key concern at the time was to attract and maintain a sizable workforce, which induced the firm to invest heavily in local amenities—like the development of education and health infrastructure—that can account for our result. Consistent with this mechanism, we show, empirically and through a proposed model, that the firm's investment efforts increase with worker mobility.

We model the world economy as one system of endogenous input-output relationships subject to frictions and study how the world's input-output structure and world's GDP change due to changes in frictions. We derive a sufficient statistic to identify frictions from the observed world input-output matrix, which we fully match for the year 2011. We show how changes in internal frictions impact the whole structure of the world's economy and that they have a much larger effect on world's GDP than external frictions. We also use our approach to study the role of internal frictions during the Great Recession of 2007–2009.

United States households’ consumption expenditures and car purchases collapsed during the Great Recession and more so than income changes would have predicted. Using CEX data, we show that both the extensive and the intensive car spending margins contracted sharply in the Great Recession. We also document significant crosscohort differences in the impact of the Great Recession including a stronger reduction in car spending by younger cohorts. We draw inference on the sources of the Great Recession by investigating which shocks can explain household choices in a 60 period life-cycle model with idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks fitted to aggregate and lifecycle moments. We find that the Great Recession was caused by a combination of large aggregate income and wealth shocks, while cross-cohort adjustment patterns imply a role for life-cycle income profile shocks. We also find a role for car loan premia shocks in accounting for car spending and car loans.

To counteract the adverse effects of shocks, such as the global pandemic, on the economy, governments have discussed policies to improve the resilience of supply chains by reducing dependence on foreign suppliers. In this paper, we develop and quantify an adaptive production network model to study network resilience and the consequences of reshoring of supply chains. In our model, firms exit due to exogenous shocks or the propagation of shocks through the network, while firms can replace suppliers they have lost due to exit subject to switching costs and search frictions. Applying our model to a large international firm-level production network dataset, we find that restricting buyer–supplier links via reshoring policies reduces output and increases volatility and that volatility can be amplified through network adaptivity.

We construct an endogenous growth model with random interactions where firms are subject to distortions. The TFP distribution evolves endogenously as firms seek to upgrade their technology over time either by innovating or by imitating other firms. We use the model to quantify the effects of misallocation on TFP growth in emerging economies. We structurally estimate the stationary state of the dynamic model targeting moments of the empirical distribution of R&D and TFP growth in China during the period 2007–2012. The estimated model fits the Chinese data well. We compare the estimates with those obtained using data for Taiwan and perform counterfactuals to study the effect of alternative policies. R&D misallocation has a large effect on TFP growth.

This chapter reviews a recent body of theoretical and empirical work that studies the normative and positive aspects of trade policy. We start by presenting reduced-form evidence of the effects of trade policy in the presence of supply-chain linkages, on the short-run and persistent effects of trade policy across local labor markets, and on the effects of trade policy uncertainty on employment and firms. We describe the shift-share method for trade policy analysis, discuss the interpretation of the estimated effects, and provide a theoretical foundation. We then describe new quantitative frameworks, methods, and data used to study the aggregate and distributional effects of trade policy in general equilibrium. We discuss how to take into account supply-chain linkages, local labor markets, and different sources of dynamics. As an illustration, we quantify the aggregate and distributional effects of the 2018 trade war between the United States and its trading partners. Finally, we present recent theoretical insights on optimal unilateral trade policy with firm and product heterogeneity in the context of large and small open economies with perfectly and imperfectly competitive product markets. We also discuss how optimal trade policy is shaped by the presence of multiple sectors, intermediate goods, and supply-chain linkages. We close the chapter by discussing the scope of future research.

This paper studies the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on small businesses between March and November 2020 using new survey data on 35,000 small businesses in eight Latin American countries. We document that the pandemic had large negative impacts on employment and beliefs regarding the future, which in turn predict meaningful economic outcomes in the medium-term. Despite the unprecedented amount of aid, policies had limited impact for small and informal firms. These firms were less aware of programs, applied less, and received less assistance. This may have lasting consequences, as businesses that received aid reported better outcomes and expectations about the future.

We show that labor market transaction costs explain why the smallest farms are more efficient than slightly larger farms in most low-income countries and that increases in machine capacity with operational scale result in the globally observed rising upper tail of productivity. We find evidence consistent with these mechanisms using Indian data, and we show that if all Indian farms were at the minimum scale required to maximize the return on land, the number of farms would be reduced by 82% and income per farm worker would rise by 68%.

We develop a model of political competition with endogenous turn-out and endogenous platforms. Parties trade off incentivizing their supporters to vote and discouraging the supporters of the competing party from voting. We show that the latter objective is particularly pronounced for a party with an edge in the political race. Thus, an increase in political support for a party may lead to the adoption of policies favoring its opponents so as to asymmetrically demobilize them. We study the implications for the political economy of redistributive taxation. Equilibrium tax policy is typically aligned with the interest of voters who are demobilized.

We document that an experimental intervention offering transport subsidies for poor rural households to migrate seasonally in Bangladesh improved risk sharing. A theoretical model of endogenous migration and risk sharing shows that the effect of subsidizing migration depends on the underlying economic environment. If migration is risky, a temporary subsidy can induce an improvement in risk sharing and enable profitable migration. We estimate the model and find that the migration experiment increased welfare by 12.9%. Counterfactual analysis suggests that a permanent, rather than temporary, decline in migration costs in the same environment would result in a reduction in risk sharing.

We develop a framework for quantifying barriers to labor force participation (LFP) and entrepreneurship faced by women in developing countries, and apply it to the Indian economy. We find that women face substantial barriers to LFP. The costs for expanding businesses through the hiring of workers are also substantially higher for women entrepreneurs. However, there is one area in which female entrepreneurs have an advantage: the hiring of female workers. We show that this is not driven by the sectoral composition of female employment. Consistent with this pattern, we find even without promoting female LFP, policies that boost female entrepreneurship can significantly increase female LFP. Counterfactual simulations indicate that removing all excess barriers faced by women entrepreneurs would substantially increase the fraction of female-owned firms, female LFP, earnings, and generate substantial gains in aggregate productivity and welfare. These gains are due to higher LFP, higher real wages and profits, and reallocation: low productivity male-owned firms previously sheltered from female competition are replaced by higher productivity female-owned firms previously excluded from the economy.

We build a multicountry dynamic general equilibrium model to study the economic effects of the 2004 enlargement of the European Union. In our model, trade is costly and households of different skills and nationalities face costly forward-looking migration decisions. We exploit the timing of migration policy changes to identify the changes in migration costs. We find that the changes in migration and trade policy resulted in aggregate welfare gains but with heterogeneous effects across skill groups. We study the interaction between trade and migration policies and highlight the importance of trade for quantifying the welfare and migration effects of labor market integration.