A quantitative framework of firm dynamics is developed where the size of the informal sector is determined by financial constraints and the burden of taxation. Improving access to credit for formal sector firms increases aggregate total factor productivity and output while reducing the size of the informal sector. Introducing size-dependent taxes reduces the gains from financial development as they incentivize firms to produce at a relatively limited scale. The aggregate effects of eliminating formal sector registration costs are positive but modest relative to previous theoretical models and the gains generated by financial development, and consistent with empirical evidence based on micro-level data.

This paper examines the consequences of international financial integration in a two-sector standard incomplete markets model with occupational choice under risk and financial constraints affecting entrepreneurial activity. We endogenize international productivity differences and discuss the implications of international integration for the macroeconomy, inequality, and welfare. Lending countries are characterized by tighter domestic constraints and experience an increase in gross national product, whereas the gross domestic product effect is ambiguous. We conclude that international integration is beneficial only for economies where there are substantial financial constraints on entrepreneurial activity. Otherwise, a majority of households suffer, due to the unequal distribution of welfare gains and losses across the heterogeneous population.

We investigate how stochastic asset price dynamics with herding and financial constraints explains the presence of a period of financial distress (PFD) following the peak and preceding the crash of a bubble [Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crisis, 4th ed. (New York: Wiley, 2000, Appendix B)] as common among most major historical speculative bubbles. Simulations show that the PFD is due to (1) agents' wealth distribution dynamics and (2) positive and sufficiently high transaction costs generating losses for a significant mass of the agents' distribution after the peak of the bubble. The use of transaction costs to get the result is only a modeling tool. Many other mechanisms—able to generate losses for a large mass of the agents' distribution in periods in which financial constraints bind—can produce the same result. The paper also shows how the PFD is affected by a variation of the sensitivity of price to the excess demand and by the switching strategy.