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...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of speculative attacks on pegged exchange rates in 22 countries between 1967 and 1992. We define speculative attacks or crises as large movements in exchange rates, interest rates, and international reserves. We develop stylized facts concerning the...

Why are average hours worked per adult lower in rich countries than in poor countries? Two natural candidates to consider are income effects in preferences, in which leisure becomes more valuable when income rises, and distortionary tax systems, which are more prevalent in richer countries. To...

Recent studies find that observational returns to rural-urban migration are near zero in three developing countries. We revisit this result using panel tracking surveys from six countries, finding higher returns on average. We then interpret these returns in a multi-region Roy model with...

This paper quantitatively analyzes how policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic should differ in developing countries. To do so we build an incomplete-markets macroeconomic model with heterogeneous agents and epidemiological dynamics that features several of the key distinctions between...

Alexander Swoboda is one of the originators of the bipolar view that capital mobility creates pressure for countries to abandon intermediate exchange rate arrangements in favor of greater flexibility and harder pegs. This paper takes another look at the evidence for this hypothesis using two...

We analyze banking crises using a panel of macroeconomic and financial data for more than one hundred developing countries from 1975 through 1992. We find that banking crises in emerging markets are strongly associated with adverse external conditions. In particular Northern interest rates are...

This paper studies the effect of foreign aid on economic stabilization. Following Alesina and Drazen (1991), we model the delay in stabilizing as the result of a distributional struggle: reforms are postponed because they are costly and each distributional faction hopes to reduce its share of...

In most developing countries, there is a large gap in average consumption per capita between urban and rural areas. One appealing interpretation of this gap is that it reflects a spatial equilibrium, in which the higher consumption levels of urban areas are offset by lower non-monetary...