"For United States annual data that include World War II, the estimated multiplier for temporary defense spending is 0.4–0.5 contemporaneously and 0.6-0.7 over 2 years. If the change in defense spending is "permanent" (gauged by Ramey's defense-news variable), the multipliers are higher by...

The central objective of our paper is to empirically examine the relationship between financial development and income inequality. Theoretically, there are grounds for both a positive and negative relationship between the two variables. Our main finding is that financial development contributes...

We address the question of whether growth and welfare can be higher in crisis prone economies. First, we show that there is a robust empirical link between per-capita GDP growth and negative skewness of credit growth across countries with active financial markets. That is, countries that have...

This paper presents a theoretical model and empirical evidence to explain the observation that a country in which the level of technology approaches the technology frontier tends to rely more on technology creation than adoption, and to invest more in basic research than in development. The...

The rapid accumulation of private debt is widely viewed as a major risk to financial and economic stability. This paper systematically and comprehensively assesses the effect of private debt buildup on economic growth. In the spirit of Mian, Sufi, and Verner (2017) that separately examine the...

We investigate the conditions under which tax revenues can enhance economic growth. Using a newly constructed dataset consisting of 135 economies and spanning the period 1990-2019, we study how changes in tax revenues impact economic growth using a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model. Tax...