Excerpt
Excerpt
Capital Allocation and Productivity in South Europe. Gita Gopinath, July 2015, Paper, "Following the introduction of the euro in 1999, countries in the South experienced large capital inflows and low productivity. We use data for manufacturing firms in Spain to document a significant increase in the dispersion of the return to capital across firms, a stable dispersion of the return to labor across firms, and a significant increase in productivity losses from misallocation over time. We develop a model of heterogenous firms facing financial frictions and investment adjustment costs. The model is consistent with cross-sectional and time-series patterns in size, productivity, capital returns, investment, and debt observed in production and balance sheet data." Link