This paper reviews empirical evidence on the micro-level consequences of family planning programs in middle- and low-income countries. In doing so, it focuses on fertility outcomes (the number and timing of births), women's health and socio-economic outcomes (mortality, human capital, and labor...

A large literature has documented that fiscal policy is procyclical in emerging markets and developing economies and acyclical/countercyclical in advanced economies. This paper analyzes fiscal procyclicality in commodity-exporting countries. It first shows that the degree of fiscal...

The literature on aid and growth has not found a convincing instrumental variable to identify the causal effects of aid. This paper exploits an instrumental variable based on the fact that since 1987, eligibility for aid from the International Development Association (IDA) has been based partly...

Foreign aid is one of the most important policy tools that rich countries use for helping poor countries to improve population well-being and facilitate economic and institutional development. The empirical evidence on its benefits is mixed and has generated much controversy. This paper presents...

Using a structural life-cycle model and data on school visits from Safegraph and school closures from Burbio, we quantify the heterogeneous impact of school closures during the Corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental...

A robust body of evidence shows that air pollution exposure is detrimental to health outcomes, often measured as deaths and hospitalizations. This literature has focused less on subclinical channels that nonetheless impact behavior, performance, and skills. This article reviews the economic...

Housing affordability is the main policy challenge for many large cities in the world. Zoning changes, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy makers. But how effective are they at combatting the affordability crisis? We build a new framework to...

We compare risk sharing in response to demand and supply shocks in four types of currency unions: segmented markets; a banking union; a capital market union; and complete financial markets. We show that a banking union is efficient at sharing all domestic demand shocks (deleveraging, fiscal...

The outreach of macroprudential policies is likely limited in practice by imperfect regulation enforcement, whether due to shadow banking, regulatory arbitrage, or other regulation circumvention schemes. We study how such concerns affect the design of optimal regulatory policy in a workhorse...

Technological change, from the advent of robots to expanded trade opportunities, tends to create winners and losers. How should government policy respond? And how should the overall welfare impact of technological change on society be valued? We provide a general theory of optimal technology...