Search

Using data from patents, citations, inter-sectoral sales and customs, we examine the international diffusion of technology through imports of sectoral knowledge and production inputs. We develop an instrumental variable strategy to identify the causal effects of technology embodied in imports on innovation and diffusion outcomes.

We study liquidity requirements in a framework with fire sales. The framework nests three common pricing mechanisms and produces the same observables. Absent risk-sharing considerations, the equilibrium is efficient with cash-in-the-market pricing; a liquidity requirement is optimal with second-best-use pricing; and a liquidity ceiling (i.e., a cap on liquid assets) is optimal with adverse selection.

This volume will take you on a tour of the head office complex, highlighting interesting features of architecture, interior design, and decoration, as well as elements of restoration and preservation. It also features pieces from the Bank's art collection. Soft cover, 128 pages (2007).

We examine the relationship between firms’ performance and credit constraints affecting export market entry. Using administrative Canadian firm-level data, our findings show that new exporters (a) increase their productivity, (b) raise their leverage ratio and (c) increase investment. We estimate that 48 percent of Canadian manufacturers face binding credit constraints when deciding whether to enter export markets.

In our analysis of the US productivity slowdown in the 1970s and 2000s, we find that a significant portion of this deceleration can be attributed to a lack of improvement in allocative efficiency across sectors. Our analysis further identifies increased sector-level volatility as a major contributor to this lack of improvement in allocative efficiency.

Economic activities typically involve coordination among a large number of agents. These agents have to anticipate what other agents think before making their own decisions.

Modeling and estimating persistent discrete data can be challenging. In this paper, we use an autoregressive panel probit model where the autocorrelation in the discrete variable is driven by the autocorrelation in the latent variable. In such a non-linear model, the autocorrelation in an unobserved variable results in an intractable likelihood containing high-dimensional integrals.

Economists disagree about the factors driving the substantial increase in residual wage inequality in the United States over the past few decades. To identify changes in the returns to unobserved skills, we make a novel assumption about the dynamics of skills (especially among older workers) rather than about the stability of skill distributions across cohorts, as is standard.