We consider a model where firms differ in their productivity and workers are differentiated by skill and gender. A reduction in tariffs induces more productive firms to modernize their technology and enter the export market. New technologies involve computerized production processes and lower the need for physically demanding skills. As a result, the relative wage and employment of women improves in blue-collar tasks, but not in white-collar tasks. We empirically confirm these theoretical predictions using a panel of Mexican establishments and the tariff reductions associated with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

We quantify the effects of lending and balance sheet channels on corporate investment during large devaluations. We find that if currency crises are accompanied by banking crises, domestic exporters holding unhedged foreign currency debt decrease investment while foreign exporters with better access to credit increase investment despite their unhedged foreign currency debt. We do not find such a differential effect under pure currency crises. Using firm-bank matched data during the global financial crisis, we showthat both domestic and foreign-owned firms experienced a decline in bank credit from affected banks; however, foreign-owned firms substituted the lost credit.

Starting in the early 1990s, countries in southern Europe experienced low productivity growth alongside declining real interest rates. We use data for manufacturing firms in Spain between 1999 and 2012 to document a significant increase in the dispersion of the return to capital across firms, a stable dispersion of the return to labor, and a significant increase in productivity losses from capital misallocation over time. We develop a model with size-dependent financial frictions that is consistent with important aspects of firms’ behavior in production and balance sheet data. We illustrate how the decline in the real interest rate, often attributed to the euro convergence process, leads to a significant decline in sectoral total factor productivity as capital inflows are misallocated toward firms that have higher net worth but are not necessarily more productive. We show that similar trends in dispersion and productivity losses are observed in Italy and Portugal but not in Germany, France, and Norway.