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Working Paper
Innovation Booms, Easy Financing, and Human Capital Accumulation
Innovation booms are often fueled by easy financing, allowing new technology firms to pay high wages that attract skilled labor. Studying the information and communication technology (ICT) boom in the late 1990s, we show that high-skill workers who joined the ICT sector during the boom experienced sizeable long-term earnings losses. These earnings patterns stem from accelerated skill obsolescence rather than worker selection or the subsequent bust in the ICT sector. Moreover, during the boom, financing disproportionately flowed to firms whose workers would later experience the largest ...
Working Paper
Industrial Policy and Capital Misallocation in Exporting
Trade financing through export credit agencies is a key tool of modern industrial policy. We provide a theory to evaluate its welfare effects, and we study its causal impact on trade, firm investment, and capital misallocation by using the effective shutdown of the US export credit agency from 2015 to 2019 as a natural experiment. First, we show that the US Export-Import Bank (EXIM) has large causal effects: comparing industries exposed and unexposed to the shutdown, we find that exposed industries experience a product-level export reduction of approximately $4.49 for each $1 lost in EXIM ...