The paper examines the determinants of employment growth, drawing on data available across a sample of Caribbean countries. To that end, the paper analyzes estimates of the employment-output elasticity and the response of employment growth to major sources of labor market determinants, in the...

Structural reforms are expected to lift growth and employment, but their effects are surprisingly difficult to pin down empirically. One reason is their potential endogeneity to the economic environment in which they are conducted. For example, the impact of a reform implemented shortly before a...

We study empirically the reaction of fiscal policy to changes in the permanent and transitory components of GDP in a panel of countries. We find evidence that government spending tends to be counter-cyclical conditional on temporary shocks and pro-cyclical conditional on permanent shocks. We...

We employ a duration model to study determinants of public debt cycles in 57 advanced and emerging economies over the 1960-2014 period, with a particular focus on the impact of financial cycles. The results suggest that the association between financial and debt cycles is asymmetric. Debt...

This paper argues that asset price cycles have significant effects on fiscal outcomes. In particular, there is evidence of debt bias-the tendency of debt to increase over the cycle- that is significantly larger for house price cycles than stand-alone business cycles. Automatic stabilizers and...

This paper analyzes the impact of strained government finances on macroeconomic stability and the transmission of fiscal policy. Using a variant of the model by Curdia and Woodford (2009), we study a "sovereign risk channel" through which sovereign default risk raises funding costs in the...

This paper examines the impact of e-invoicing on firm tax compliance and performance using administrative tax data and quasi-experimental variation in the rollout of VAT electronic invoicing in Peru. We find that e-invoicing increases reported firm sales, purchases and value-added by over 5...