Scholars, policymakers, aid donors, and aid recipients acknowledge the importance of good governance for development. This understanding has spurred an intense interest in more refined, nuanced, and policy-relevant indicators of governance. In this paper we review progress to date in the area of...

This paper uses a novel loan-level dataset covering lending by official creditors to developing country governments to construct an instrument for public spending that can be used to estimate government spending multipliers. Loans from official creditors (primarily multilateral development banks...

We consider public debt from a long-term historical perspective, showing how the purposes for which governments borrow have evolved over time. Periods when debt-to-GDP ratios rose explosively as a result of wars, depressions and financial crises also have a long history. Many of these episodes...

It is well known that business cycles in OECD countries exhibit a remarkable degree of synchronization. Much less known is that the peak of the OECD cycle is associated with high prices of labour-intensive products and low prices of capital-intensive ones. We document this cyclical behavior of...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of speculative attacks on pegged exchange rates in 22 countries between 1967 and 1992. We define speculative attacks or crises as large movements in exchange rates, interest rates, and international reserves. We develop stylized facts concerning the...

We analyze banking crises using a panel of macroeconomic and financial data for more than one hundred developing countries from 1975 through 1992. We find that banking crises in emerging markets are strongly associated with adverse external conditions. In particular Northern interest rates are...