Housing cycles and their impact on the financial system and the macroeconomy have become the center of attention following the global financial crisis. This paper documents the characteristics of housing cycles in a large set of countries, and examines the determinants of house price movements....

This paper examines the distributional impact of capital account liberalization. Using panel data for 149 countries from 1970 to 2010, we find that, on average, capital account liberalization reforms increase inequality and reduce the labor share of income in the short and medium term. We also...

This paper investigates the role that International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs and capacity building play in fostering structural reforms. To do so, we exploit two novel datasets on IMF capacity building and structural reforms available for over one hundred IMF member countries over the period...

The paper provides a detailed description of a novel dataset on education attainment in public administrations covering the period 1981-2011 for 178 countries. The dataset uses information extracted from CVs for over 130,000 mid to senior level officials from mainly central banks and ministries...

We examine the behavior of forecasts for real GDP growth using a large panel of individual forecasts from 30 advanced and emerging economies during 1989–2010. Our main findings are as follows. First, our evidence does not support the validity of the sticky information model (Mankiw and Reis,...

The Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) has extensively treated the adverse effects of climatechange and the appropriate mitigation policy. We extend such a model to include optimalpolicies for mitigation, adaptation and infrastructure investment studying the dynamics of thetransition to a low...