Abstract This paper studies the causal effect of foreign currency dependence on international trade by exploiting Brazil and Argentina's 2008 introduction of a bilateral payments system that eliminated the U.S. dollar as vehicle currency. I identify causal effects using a triple-difference design comparing exports across municipalities with varying bank access and across destinations to control for contemporaneous shocks including the financial crisis. Firm-level analysis finds that local currency adoption increased export values significantly, with effects concentrated among non-commodity exporters. These results demonstrate that foreign currency dependence constitutes a meaningful barrier to emerging market trade.

Abstract We use the high-frequency, decentralized implementation of stay-at-home (SAH) orders in the United States to disentangle the labor market effects of SAH orders from the general economic disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that each week of SAH exposure increased a state's weekly initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims by 1.9% of its employment level relative to other states. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that of the 17 million UI claims between March 14 and April 4, only 4 million were attributable to SAH orders. We present a currency union model to provide conditions for mapping this estimate to aggregate employment losses.

Using an annual panel of US states over the period 1982-2014, we estimate the response of macroeconomic variables to a shock to the number of new firms (startups). We find that these shocks have significant effects that persist for many years on real GDP, productivity, and population. This is consistent with simple models of firm dynamics where a “missing generation” of firms affects productivity persistently.