This paper studies equity price volatility in general equilibrium with news shocks about future productivity and monetary policy. As West (1998) shows, in a partial equilibrium present discounted value model, news about the future cash flow reduces asset price volatility. This paper shows that...

While economists have tended to focus on specific public policies when developing recommendations, the achievement of welfare objectives might depend more on the quality of policies than their content. This paper develops several measures of the qualities of policies across countries, arguing...

This paper studies the joint effect of economic and political inequalities on redistributive taxation and institutional quality. The theoretical model suggests that income inequality, coupled with political bias in favor of the rich, decreases redistribution and lowers institutional quality. The...

This paper shows that bank linkages have a positive effect on international trade. A global banking network (GBN) is constructed at the bank level, using individual syndicated loan data from Loan Analytics for 1990-2007. Network distance between bank pairs is computed and aggregated to country...

This paper compares the optimal dynamic choices between policies of mitigation and adaptation for three economies: Brazil, Chile and the United States. The focus is on the optimal role of mitigation and adaptation for “environmentally small economies,” i. e. , economies that are witnessing...

This paper investigates the international spillovers of housing demand shocks on real economic activity. The global economy is modelled using a Global VAR, with a novel house price data set for both advanced and emerging economies. The impulse responses to an identified US housing demand shock...

Financial stability is an important policy objective, since crises are associated with large economic, social and political costs. This paper contributes to the discussion by providing new theoretical and empirical evidence on the causal connection between lack of exposure to commercial trade...

The paper explores the incidence of sudden stops in capital flows on the incentives for building national institutions that secure property rights in a world where sovereign defaults are possible equilibrium outcomes. Also thepaper builds upon the benchmark model of sovereign default and direct...

Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address...