Schedule

We investigate how access to finance and infrastructure jointly shape comparative advantage. We link Colombian banks, firms, exports, and payments data and document three facts. First, most exported goods are shipped by air and sea; second, firms receive payments faster when they ship by air than by sea; third, firms with better access to finance are less likely to ship by air. We build a trade model where firms finance their production while facing sectoral interest rates, heterogeneous delivery lags, and iceberg trade costs by sector and mode, generating tradeoffs among exporters between interest rate payments and shipping costs. A reduction in the interest rate effectively reduces the price of shipping by sea, thus shifting national comparative advantage towards sea-intensive sectors.

We show that PE sponsors relax borrowing constraints by providing support in distress and injecting equity, allowing firms to borrow more at lower spreads, with lower seniority, and less reliance on collateral. Access to equity in distress reduces credit risk, facilitates investment and growth, and helps resolve distress. To isolate the causal effects of equity financing, we construct a shift-share instrument exploiting predetermined variation in sponsors' portfolio exposure to Covid-19 and hence in their capacity to support portfolio firms. Our findings highlight a complementarity between debt and equity: improved access to equity financing stimulates debt financing by expanding borrowing capacity.

How does mortgage affordability shape city growth and fertility choices? We study the revolutions in mortgage financing that took place in the U.S. between 1933 and 1940, which created a national mortgage market facilitating mortgage capital to move from the financial centers to the rest of the country. By digitizing city-level census data and a new sample of loan-level data, we show that differences in mortgage rates across cities went from nearly 300 basis points to just over 100 in just six years. This national mortgage market allowed initially capital-scarce places to grow more than capital-abundant ones. In the decades following the housing policies, cities that had higher rates before the shock saw higher growth in rates of homeownership, population, housing construction, and house prices. Young households in these cities witnessed higher birthrates even before the post-World War II baby boom.

We study the firm-level effects of the 2018 and 2025 US tariff episodes. Combining bill-of-lading, supply chain, and financial data, we construct exposure measures across three channels: direct import costs, upstream suppliers' costs, and retaliatory tariffs on exports, validated using stock returns and earnings calls. We provide new evidence that, in 2025, cost exposure reduced sales and variable costs by about 1 percentage point for firms with average tariff exposure, with no margin or investment effects, consistent with demand-driven contractions under constant markups.

Governments around the world have gone on a massive fiscal expansion in response to the Covid crisis, increasing government debt to levels not seen in 75 years. How will this debt be repaid? What role do conventional and unconventional monetary policy play? We investigate debt sustainability in a New Keynesian model with an intermediary sector, realistic fiscal and monetary policy, endogenous convenience yields, and substantial risk premia. When conventional monetary policy is constrained by the ZLB during an economic crisis, increased government spending and lower tax revenue lead to a large rise in government debt and raise the risk of future tax increases. We find that quantitative easing (QE), forward guidance, and an expansion in government discretionary spending all contribute to lowering debt/GDP ratio and reducing this fiscal risk. A transitory QE policy deployed during a crisis stimulates aggregate demand.