Central bankers often assert that low inflation and anchoring of inflation expectations are good for economic growth (Bernanke 2007, Plosser 2007). We test this claim using panel data on sectoral growth for 22 manufacturing industries for 36 advanced and emerging market economies over the period...

This paper explores the short-term employment effect of deregulating job protection for regular workers and how it varies with prevailing business cycle conditions. We apply a local projection method to a newly constructed 'narrative' dataset of major regular job protection reforms covering 26...

This paper provides new empirical evidence of the macroeconomic effects of public investment in developing economies. Using public investment forecast errors to identify unanticipated changes in public investment, the paper finds that increased public investment raises output in the short and...

Medium-term growth can be enhanced by fiscal stabilization. However, to date, no systematic effort has been made to study the specific channels through which fiscal stabilization affects growth. This paper examines the effect of fiscal stabilization on industrial growth and how this effect...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the dynamic effect of social and political instability on output. Using a panel of up to 183 countries from 1980 to 2010, the results of the paper suggest that social conflicts have a significant and negative impact on output in the short-term with the...

The aim of this paper is to provide new estimates of employment-output elasticities and assess the effect of structural and macroeocnomic policies on the employment-intensity of growth. Using an unbalanced panel of 167 countries over the period 1991 - 2009, the results suggest that structural...

We develop a new Measure of Aggregate Trade Restrictions (MATR) using data from the IMF's Annual Report on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Restrictions. MATR is an empirical measure of how restrictive official government policy is towards the international flow of goods and services. MATR is...

Labor market deregulation, intended to boost productivity and employment, is one plausible, yet little studied, driver of the decline in labor shares that took place across most advanced economies since the early 1990s. This paper assesses the impact of job protection deregulation in a sample of...