The workhorse open-economy macro model suggests that capital inflows are contractionary because they appreciate the currency and reduce net exports. Emerging market policy makers however believe that inflows lead to credit booms and rising output, and the evidence appears to go their way. To...

Governments issue debt for good and bad reasons. While the good reasons-intertemporal tax-smoothing, fiscal stimulus, and asset management-can explain some of the increases in public debt in recent years, they cannot account for all of the observed changes. Bad reasons for borrowing are driven...

We take a fresh look at the aggregate and distributional effects of policies to liberalizeinternational capital flows-financial globalization. Both country- and industry-level resultssuggest that such policies have led on average to limited output gains while contributing tosignificant increases...

Do structural reforms that aim to boost potential output also change the distribution of income? We shed light on this question by looking at the broad patterns in the cross-country data covering advanced, emerging-market, and low-income countries. Our main finding is that there is indeed...

This paper provides evidence on the impact of major epidemics from the past two decades on income distribution. The pandemics in our sample, even though much smaller in scale than COVID-19, have led to increases in the Gini coefficient, raised the income share of higher-income deciles, and...