Understanding the mechanism through which financial globalization affect economic performance is crucial for evaluating the costs and benefits of opening financial markets. This paper is a first attempt at disentangling the effects of financial integration on the two main determinants of economic performance: productivity (TFP) and investments. I provide empirical evidence from a sample of 93 countries observed between 1975 and 1999. The results suggest that financial integration has a positive direct effect on productivity, while it spurs capital accumulation only with some delay and indirectly, since capital follows the rise in productivity. I control for indirect effects of financial globalization through banking crises. Such episodes depress both investments and TFP, though they are triggered by financial integration only to a minor extent. The paper also provides a discussion of a simple model on the effects of financial integration, and shows additional empirical evidence supporting it.JEL Classification: G15, F43, O40, C23

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We study the determinants of political myopia in a rational model of electoral accountability where the key elements are informational frictions and uncertainty. We build a framework where political ability is ex-ante unknown and policy choices are not perfectly observable. On the one hand, elections improve accountability and allow to keep wellperforming incumbents. On the other, politicians invest too little in costly policies with future returns in an attempt to signal high ability and increase their reelection probability.Contrary to the conventional wisdom, uncertainty reduces political myopia and may, under some conditions, increase social welfare. We use the model to study how political rewards can be set so as to maximise social welfare and the desirability of imposing a one-term limit to governments. The predictions of our theory are consistent with a number of stylised facts and with a new empirical observation documented in this paper: aggregate uncertainty, measured by economic volatility, is associated to better …scal discipline in a panel of 20 OECD countries.

We study the determinants of firm-level heterogeneity in a model where innovation choices upon entry affect the variance of productivity draws. In equilibrium, productivity is Pareto distributed with a shape parameter that depends on industry-level characteristics. We show that export opportunities, by increasing the pay-offs in the tail, induce firms to invest in bigger projects with more dispersed outcomes. When more productive firms pay higher wages, trade amplifies wage dispersion by making firms more unequal. These results are consistent with how firm size, innovation and wage heterogeneity vary in a panel of US industries and states.