IMF programs are often considered to carry a “stigma” that triggers adverse market reactions. We show that such a negative IMF effect disappears when accounting for endogenous selection into programs. To proxy for a country's access to financial markets, we use credit ratings and investor...

This paper investigates the impact of banking prudential regulation on sovereign risk. We show that prudential regulation reduces sovereign risk and induces governments to spend more. As a result, countries with tight prudential regulation have lower primary budget balances and accumulate more...

We investigate yardstick competition between local jurisdictions in which pure rent-seeking incumbents undertake an identical infrastructure project choosing be- tween two contractual arrangements with different financing profiles, namely traditional procurement (TP) and public-private...

We consider a public-private partnership in an infrastructure project, which requires specialised expertise during the construction stage for the infrastructure to operationalise. This entails that, after an investment is made to begin building the infrastructure, its construction is completed...

This paper studies the role played by politics in shaping the Italian railway network, and its impact on long-run growth patterns. Examining a large state-planned railway expansion that took place during the second half of the 19th century in a recently unified country, we first study how both...

What is the impact on intra-national trade and regional economic outcomes when the quality and lane-capacity of an existing paved road network is expanded significantly? We investigate this question for the case of Turkey, which undertook a large-scale public investment in roads during the...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

It has been frequently quoted in the literature that one decisive cause of the productive performance of an economy might be infrastructure investment. This paper provides a dual profit theoretical framework of measuring the effects of infrastructure on economic performance in terms of gains in...

This paper quantitatively assesses the macroeconomic effects of the recently agreed U.S. bipartisan infrastructure spending bill in a neoclassical growth model. We add to the literature by considering a more detailed tax structure, different types of infrastructure spending and linkages between...