This paper depicts an often neglected channel of transmission of monetary policy, namely international safety appetite, as an important source of production and risk-taking international monetary spillovers. The model features a local economy with exogenous financial frictions that lead firms to...

Free media may not favor political accountability when other democratic institutions are weak, and may even bring undesirable unintended consequences. We propose a simple model in which candidates running for office may engage in coercion to obtain votes. A media scandal exposing these...

Variation in factor shares, extensively documented in recent years, implies that standard growth accounting exercises are plagued by measurement issues. First, the standard assumption of constant shares generates a bias in the estimation of the contribution of factors to economic growth. Second,...

We re-examine the view that wars make strong states, taking advantage of panel data to address two of the most obvious endogeneity concerns that arise in this context: initial conditions and persistence of state capacity. Our main message is that, in modern times, there is no evidence that wars...