[Introduction] Italy has the fourth largest stock of public debt in the world, the second highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7 group of advanced economies, and the highest debt service ratio in the G7. Although there is no strong evidence that public debt has a causal effect on economic growth...

A recent policy brief from the Peterson Institute suggests that the "Too Much Finance" result may be an artifact of spurious attribution of causality. While more works needs do be done to understand the links between finance and growth and explore the drivers of possible non-monotonicities, this...

This paper contributes the on-going debate on income inequality in advanced economies with a proposal aimed at reducing costly investment mistakes that are prevalent among middle-class households. The paper starts by describing how households should invest, compares it with what we know about...

This paper studies the relationship between sovereign spreads and the interaction between debt composition and debt levels in advanced and emerging market countries. It finds that in emerging market countries there is a significant correlation between spreads and debt levels. This correlation,...

This paper summarizes the main findings of the literature on the relationship between financial and economic development (the known knowns), points to directions for future research (the known unknowns), and then speculates on the third Rumsfeldian category. The known knowns section organizes...

Recent work suggests that non-financial firms have acted like financial intermediaries particularly in emerging economies. We corroborate these findings but then ask why? Our results indicate evidence for carry-trade activities but focused in countries with higher levels of capital controls,...

A surprisingly large number of countries have been able to finance a significant fraction of domestic investment using foreign finance for extended periods. While many of these episodes are in low-income countries where official finance is more important than private finance, we also identify a...

In China, local public debt issuance between 2006 and 2013 crowded out investment by private manufacturing firms by tightening their funding constraints, while it did not affect state-owned and foreign firms. Using novel data for local public debt issuance, we establish this result in three...

For over a century, legal scholars have debated the question of what to do about the debts incurred by despotic governments; asking whether successor non-despotic governments should have to pay them. That debate has gone nowhere. This paper examines whether an Op Ed written by Harvard economist,...

We estimate public investment gaps in a sample of developing countries using a public investment demand function. We then use GDP per capita projections, forecasts of structural transformation, and three SDG targets (poverty, infant mortality and lower secondary school completion) to predict...