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...

There is limited empirical evidence on whether unrestricted cash social assistance to poor pregnant women improves children's birth outcomes. Using program administrative micro-data matched to longitudinal vital statistics on the universe of births in Uruguay, we estimate that participation in a...

Conventional wisdom has it that global financial markets were as well integrated in the 1890s as in the 1990s, but that it took several post-war decades to regenerate the connections that existed before 1914. This view has emerged from a variety of tests for world financial capital market...

Both the literature and new empirical evidence show that exchange rate regimes differ primarily by the noisiness of the exchange rate, not be measurable macroeconomic fundamentals. This motivates a theoretical analysis of exchange rate regimes with noise traders. The presence of noise traders...

Based on an endogenous growth model, we show that intermediate goods markets imperfections can curb incentives to improve productivity downstream. We confirm such prediction by estimating a model of multifactor productivity growth in which the effects of upstream competition vary with distance...

A stable international monetary system has emerged since the early 1990s. A large number of industrial and a growing number of developing countries now have domestic inflation targets administered by independent and transparent central banks. These countries place few restrictions on capital...

Using a panel of 21 OECD countries and 40 years of annual data, we find that countries with similar government budget positions tend to have business cycles that fluctuate more closely. That is, fiscal convergence (in the form of persistently similar ratios of government surplus/deficit to GDP)...