This article analyzes the heterogeneous reaction of exporters to real exchange rate changes using a very rich French firm-level data set with destination-specific export values and volumes on the period 1995–2005. We find that high–performance firms react to a depreciation by increasing significantly more their markup and by increasing less their export volume. This heterogeneity in pricing-to-market is robust to different measures of performance, samples, and econometric specifications. It is consistent with models where the demand elasticity decreases with firm performance. Since aggregate exports are concentrated on high-productivity firms, precisely those that absorb more exchange rate movements in their markups, heterogeneous pricing-to-market may partly explain the weak impact of exchange rate movements on aggregate exports.

One goal of extending the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) in recessions is to increase UI coverage in the face of longer unemployment spells. Although it is a common concern that such extensions may themselves raise nonemployment durations, it is not known how recessions would affect the magnitude of this moral hazard. To obtain causal estimates of the differential effects of UI in booms and recessions, this article exploits the fact that in Germany, potential UI benefit duration is a function of exact age which is itself invariant over the business cycle. We implement a regression discontinuity design separately for 20 years and correlate our estimates with measures of the business cycle. We find that the nonemployment effects of a month of additional UI benefits are, at best, somewhat declining in recessions. Yet the UI exhaustion rate, and therefore the additional coverage provided by UI extensions, rises substantially during a downturn. The ratio of these two effects represents the nonemployment response of workers weighted by the probability of being affected by UI extensions. Hence, our results imply that the effective moral hazard effect of UI extensions is significantly lower in recessions than in booms. Using a model of job search with liquidity constraints, we also find that in the absence of market-wide effects, the net social benefits from UI extensions can be expressed either directly in terms of the exhaustion rate and the nonemployment effect of UI durations, or as a declining function of our measure of effective moral hazard.

This paper explores the consequences of improving property rights to facilitate the use of fixed assets as collateral, popularly attributed to the influential policy advocate Hernando de Soto. We use an equilibrium model of a credit market with moral hazard to characterize the theoretical effects, and also develop a quantitative analysis using data from Sri Lanka. We show that the effects are likely to be non-linear and heterogeneous by wealth group. They also depend on the extent of competition between lenders. There can be significant increases in profits and reductions in interest rates when credit markets are competitive. However, since these are due to reductions in moral hazard, i.e. increased effort, the welfare gains tend to be modest when cost of effort is taken into account. Allowing for an extensive margin where borrowers gain access to the credit market, can make these effects larger depending on the underlying wealth distribution.