This paper summarizes a suite of early warning models to assess the probabilities of growth, fiscal, and financial crises in advanced economies and emerging markets. We estimate separate signal-extraction models for each type of crisis and sample of countries, and we use our results to generate...

We shed new light on the determinants of growth by tackling the blunt and weak instrument problems in the empirical growth literature. As an instrument for each endogenous variable, we propose average values of the same variable in neighboring countries. This method has the advantage of...

Developing Asia has exhibited rapid growth while saddled with relatively backward financial systems. One might conclude that the coexistence of sustained rapid growth and financial underdevelopment in developing Asia implies that an efficient financial sector is not indispensable for economic...

This paper empirically assesses the role of structural and institutional reforms in driving productivity growth across countries at different stages of development, using a distance-to-frontier framework. It gauges whether particular policies and reforms matter more for increasing productivity...

Developing Asia has exhibited rapid growth while saddled with relatively backward financial systems. One might conclude that the coexistence of sustained rapid growth and financial underdevelopment in developing Asia implies that an efficient financial sector is not indispensable for economic...

Using a comprehensive database on bank credit, covering 135 developing countries over the period 1960–2011, we identify, document, and compare the macro-economic dynamics of credit booms across low- and middle-income countries. The results suggest that while the duration and magnitude of...

Only a few European economies and Korea and Taiwan Province of China reached high-income status during 1970-2010. Malaysia's real income per capita increased to 26 percent of the U.S. level in 2010 from 20 percent in 1970. Despite relatively strong growth and a substantial improvement in export...

Does the distribution of income within a country become more equal as it grows richer? This paper uses plausibly exogenous variations in trade-weighted world income and international oil price shocks as instruments for within-country variations in countries' real GDP per capita to examine this...

The workhorse open-economy macro model suggests that capital inflows are contractionary because they appreciate the currency and reduce net exports. Emerging market policy makers however believe that inflows lead to credit booms and rising output, and the evidence appears to go their way. To...

The workhorse open-economy macro model suggests that capital inflows are contractionary because they appreciate the currency and reduce net exports. Emerging-market policymakers however believe that inflows lead to credit booms and rising output, and the evidence appears to go their way. To...