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...

The local sourcing of intermediate products is one the main channels for foreign direct investment (FDI) spillovers. This paper investigates whether and how participation and positioning in the global value chains (GVCs) of host countries is associated to local sourcing by foreign investors....

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,...

We use loan-level data on syndicated lending to a large sample of developing countries between 1993and 2017 to estimate the mobilization effects of multilateral development banks (MDBs), controllingfor a large set of fixed effects. We find evidence of positive and significant direct and...

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...

Cross-border bank lending is a growing source of external finance in developing countries and could play a key role for infrastructure financing. This paper looks at the role of multilateral development banks (MDBs) on the terms of syndicated loan deals, focusing on loan pricing. The results...

We study forecasts for real GDP growth using a large panel of individual forecasts from 36 advanced and emerging economies during 1989–2010. We show that the degree of information rigidity in average forecasts is substantially higher than that in individual forecasts. Individual level...