The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

In the context of international tax coordination incomplete information is one of the well-known frictions that can lead to bargaining failure and might explain a lack of observed coordination. We consider international negotiations about tax coordination under complete and incomplete...

Trade and innovation cause structural change. Productive factors must flow from declining to growing industries. Banks play a major role in cutting credit to non-viable firms in downsizing sectors and in providing new credit to finance investment in expanding, innovative sectors. Structural...

I examine whether elections influence perceived corruption in the public sector. Perceived corruption in the public sector is measured by the reversed Transparency International’s Perception of Corruption Index (CPI). The dataset includes around 100 democracies over the period 2012-2016, a...

The objective of this paper is to critically assess the use of simple rules for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that employ a rudimentary form of the Ramsey Rule. Two interrelated caveats apply. First, if climate change poses a serious problem, it is hard to justify an exogenous constant growth...

Per Magnus Wijkman was the first foreign observer to urge Iceland in print to regulate its fisheries by price. This was in 1975, nine years before the Icelandic fishing quota system came into effect, a system judged discriminatory and unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Iceland in 1998 (but...

We investigate the sources of the great changes in GDP volatility observed from 1966 to 2000. We develop a general equilibrium model and calibrate it to US data in order to characterize the contribution of micro level productivity shocks, inter-sectoral linkages and households' behavior to...

This paper examines the advantages and drawbacks of alternative methods of estimating oil supply and oil demand elasticities and of incorporating this information into structural VAR models. I not only summarize the state of the literature, but also draw attention to a number of econometric...

Do experts adjust their policy recommendations when the facts change? We conduct a large-scale randomized experiment among 1,224 economic experts across 109 countries that includes two treatments. The first treatment is the geographic and temporal variation in the initial spread of Covid-19...

We challenge the common practice of estimating gravity equations with time-interval data in order to capture dynamic-adjustment effects to trade-policy changes. Instead, we point to a series of advantages of using consecutive-year data recognizing dynamic-adjustment effects. Our analysis reveals...