Annual Conference

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Trade, Growth and Development, Senior Fellows/Fellows

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May 2022

To Own or to Rent? The Effects of Transaction Taxes on Housing Markets

Lu HAN, L. Rachel NGAI, Kevin D. SHEEDY
Using transaction records on residential property sales and leases, this paper estimates the effects of Toronto’s imposition of a tax on property purchases in 2008. Three novel effects are uncovered: (i) a rise in buy-to-rent transactions alongside a fall in transactions by owneroccupiers in spite...
Keywords: rental market, buy-to-rent investors, homeownership rate, transaction taxes.
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Annual Conference

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Trade, Growth and Development, Senior Fellows/Fellows

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May 2022

SMEs Amidst the Pandemic and Reopening: Digital Edge and Transformation

Lin William CONG, Xiaohan YANG, Xiaobo ZHANG
Using administrative universal business registration data as well as primary offline and online surveys of small businesses in China, we examine (i) whether digitization helps small and medium enterprises (SMEs) better cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, and (ii) whether the pandemic has spurred digita...
Keywords: Small Businesses, COVID-19, Digital Economy, E-Commerce
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Annual Conference

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Trade, Growth and Development

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May 2022

The Distributional Impacts of Transportation Networks in China

Yang TANG, Lin MA
This paper evaluates the dynamic and distributional impacts of transportation networks in China. We argue that the quality of roads and railroads vary substantially over time and space, and therefore binary measures of connectivity in the literature are inadequate. Instead, we construct a new panel ...
Keywords: regional trade, Migration, welfare, economic geography
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Annual Conference

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Trade, Growth and Development

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May 2022

Capital Quality, Productivity, and Financial Constraints: Evidence from India

Poorya KABIR, Seyed MANSOURI
This paper provides novel evidence that reduced financial constraints increase physical capital quality and, consequently, productivity. We use a project-level investment dataset from India, CapEx, with data on project cost, capacity added to the firm, and investment’s product category. We measure...
Keywords: capital quality, financial constraints, productivity, financial development
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows, Pandemic

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Apr 2022

Pandemic-Era Uncertainty

Steven J. DAVIS, Nicholas A. BLOOM, David E. ALTIG, Jose Maria BARRERO, Brent MEYER, Emil MIHAYLOV
We examine several measures of uncertainty to make five points. First, equity market traders and executives at nonfinancial firms have shared similar assessments about one-year-ahead uncertainty since the pandemic struck. Both the one-year VIX and our survey-based measure of firm-level uncertainty a...
Keywords: Business Expectations, Uncertainty, Subjective Forecast Distributions, Capital Investments
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