We analyze the interaction of financial development and trade in a small open economy. In a benchmark economy with full financial development, there is no misallocation. When financial development is imperfect, access to borrowing in local currency is expensive. This causes misallocation to arise among the most productive firms. Productive firms with small initial capital access the international credit market by paying a fixed cost. By borrowing in foreign currency, they scale up close to their benchmark size.

Digital job matching platforms can increase labor force participation by reducing job search costs, with potentially greater benefits for women. We implement a cluster RCT in which matched husband-wife pairs residing in urban, low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, India, are offered registration on a hyper-local job aggregator platform that matches them to potential employers (non-network arm). In another treatment arm, both the husband-wife pair and the wife's network are made the same offer (network arm), while no offer is made in the control group.

The literature that studies individual’s retirement planning highlights the importance of providing information that enable agents to make better choices. Using a program that mandates individuals to take free financial advice before changing their pension plan, we study the role of providing financial information on retirement planning. We find that the introduction of the information program changed individuals’ retirement planning decisions in the short run, as a sizable fraction of individuals decided not to change their pension plan.

What determines the distribution of establishments in terms of size and life-cycle growth? How are those determinants related to aggregate productivity? We provide novel answers by developing a framework that uses price and quantity information on establishments’ outputs and inputs to jointly estimate the demand and production parameters, and subsequently establishments’ quality-adjusted productivity, deriving both micro-level and aggregate implications.

The size of farms is an important determinant of agricultural productivity. This paper studies how rural land markets respond to weather shocks and how the farm size distribution changes as a consequence. Using two unique administrative data sets with transaction-level information on land sales in the country of Colombia and a land registry covering most of the country, we estimate the impact of extreme temperature events on the frequency of land sales and on the farm-size distribution of small geographical units.

El PIB potencial, definido como aquel no inflacionario, se usa como un instrumento para definir la postura de la política monetaria. El propósito de este documento es encontrar una medida de PIB tendencial coherente con las necesidades de política fiscal que considere los costos de una política expansiva a través del pago de intereses de la deuda soberana.

We study the dynamic effects of trade liberalization on structural change and growth for a developing economy at the municipal level. We exploit exogenous tariff reductions introduced by the FTA between Colombia and the US in 2012. By relying on a quasi-experimental shift-share research design, operationalized through local projections difference-in-differences (LP-DiD), we show that municipalities facing higher tariff reductions are characterized by lower total and GDP per capita.

Much of the recent work on gender economics explains gender gaps pointing to differences in preferences, societal gender norms and prescriptive stereotypes about what women and men should be good or bad at and what they should like or dislike. But what happens to the individuals that do not behave/choose like the gender-typical person? We address this question using longitudinal data that allows us to measure gender conformity during childhood—using a seemingly irrelevant questionnaire—and tracks individuals through their life.

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