This paper studies how drilling costs are affected by the business cycle. We decompose the major elements in these costs - rig rates and drilling speed - and examine how they interact with variations in oil prices. A highly relevant consideration in the current circumstances is whether oil...

Many jurisdictions use net metering to record the power exchange between solar photovoltaic panels and the grid, thus valuing home production at the electricity retail rate. However, if over the billing period, production exceeds consumption, the surplus remains freely available for consumption....

We study the capacity to meet food demand under conditions of climate change, economic and population growth. We take a novel approach to quantifying climate impacts, based on a model of the global economy structurally estimated on the period 1960 to 2015. The model integrates several features...

Using the multiple indicator-multiple cause (MIMIC) approach, this paper generates a novel global database by estimating the size of the shadow economy for 157 countries over 1991 to 2017. The results suggest that the OECD countries are by far the lowest with values below 20% of off official GDP...

Using the data on maintenance expenditures and self-assessed house value, I separate the measure of individual housing stock and house prices, and use these data for testing whether nondurable consumption and housing are characterized by intratemporal nonseparability in households’...

This paper develops a small open economy (SOE) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that helps to explain business cycle synchronization between an emerging market and advanced economies. The model captures the specificities of both economies (e.g. primary commodity,...

Using a theoretical model where students care about achievement rank, I study effort choices in the classroom and show that rank concerns generate peer effects. The model's key empirical prediction is that the effect on own achievement of increasing the dispersion in peer cost of effort is...

The transmission of oil price shocks has been a question of central interest in macroeconomics since the 1970s. There has been renewed interest in this question after the large and persistent fall in the real price of oil in 2014-16. In the context of this debate, Ramey (2017) makes the striking...

Using the MIMIC method, this paper is a first attempt to estimate the size of the shadow economy of 158 countries over the period 1991 up to 2015. In addition to performing a variety of robustness tests, this paper explicitly addresses endogeneity concerns to the use of GDP as cause and...

The 'saving for a rainy day' hypothesis implies that households' saving decisions reflect that they can (rationally) predict future income declines. The empirical relevance of this hypothesis plays a key role in discussions of fiscal policy multipliers and it holds under the null that the...