We study the role of financial frictions for productivity. Using a rich cross-country firm-level data, we exploit variation in preexisting exposure to the 2008 global financial crisis to study the post-crisis productivity slowdown. Firms with weaker precrisis balance sheets experienced a highly persistent decline in post-crisis total factor productivity growth relative to their less vulnerable counterparts, accounting for about one-third of the within-firm productivity slowdown. This decline was larger for firms that faced a more severe tightening of credit conditions. Financially fragile firms cut back on innovation activities, one channel through which financial frictions weakened post-crisis productivity growth.

No abstract

The extensive use of the US dollar when firms set prices for international trade (dubbed dominant currency pricing) and in their funding (dominant currency financing) has come to the forefront of policy debate, raising questions about how exchange rates work and the benefits of exchange rate flexibility. This Staff Discussion Note documents these features of international trade and finance and explores their implications for how exchange rates can help external rebalancing and buffer macroeconomic shocks.

New regulatory data reveal extensive discriminatory pricing in the foreign exchange derivatives market, in which dealer-banks and their non-financial clients trade over-the-counter.After controlling for contract characteristics, dealer fixed effects, and market conditions, we find that the client at the 75th percentile of the spread distribution pays an average of 30 pips over the market mid-price, compared to competitive spreads of less than 2.5 pips paid by the bottom 25% of clients. Higher spreads are paid by less sophisticated clients.However, trades on multi-dealer request-for-quote platforms exhibit competitive spreads regardless of client sophistication, thereby eliminating discriminatory pricing.

Over the past three decades, the price of machinery and equipment fell dramatically relative to other prices in advanced and emerging market and developing economies. Using crosscountry and sectoral data, we show that the decline in the relative price of tangible tradable capital goods provided a significant impetus to the capital deepening that took place during the same time period. The broad-based decline in the relative price of machinery and equipment, in turn, was driven by the faster productivity growth in the capital goods producing sectors relative to the rest of the economy, and deeper trade integration, which induced domestic producers to lower prices and increase their efficiency. Our findings suggest an additional channel through which rising trade tensions and sluggish productivit y could threaten real investment growth going forward.