The US economy is often referred to as the “banker to the world,” due to its unique role in supplying global reserve assets and funding foreign risky investment. This paper develops a general equilibrium model to analyze and quantify the contribution of this role to rising wealth...

Expected inflation has few real effects in purely private economies, but this is not the case when the tax system is not neutral with respect to inflation. In practice, tax systems are not neutral—though some have attempted to be so in the past—and this paper provides a comprehensive...

We introduce a novel measure of cross-country road quality based on the travel mean speed between large cities from Google Maps. This measure is useful to assess road infrastructure and access gaps. Our Mean Speed (MS) score is easier to estimate and update than traditional gauges of road...

While South Asia has gone a long way in diversifying their economies, there is substantial scope to do more. Some countries – India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka – can build on their existing production capabilities; others – Bangladesh, Bhutan, and the Maldives – would need to undertake a more...

Electoral rules determine how voters' preferences are aggregated and translated into political representation, and their design can lead to the election of representatives who represent broader or narrower constituencies. Relying on a regression discontinuity design, I contrast single- and...

The labor share has been declining in the United States, and especially so in manufacturing. This paper investigates the role of capital accumulation and market power in explaining this decline. I first estimate the production function of 21 manufacturing sectors along time series and including...

Greece’s investment rate plunged following the Sovereign Debt Crisis (SDC) and remained one of the lowest in the world in 2019. This paper explores recent investment dynamics and compares them against estimated benchmarks. Our results suggest that Greece has been under-investing since the SDC,...

We assess econometrically the impact of asset shortages on economic growth, asset bubbles, the probability of a crisis, and the current account for a group of 41 Emerging markets for 1995-2008. The econometric estimations confirm that asset shortages pose a serious danger to EMs in terms of...

Korea’s stars tell of an economy saddled with a real neutral rate (r-star) that has declined significantly in recent decades and is currently below zero. This reflects a significant decline in trend growth, and two large financial crises that triggered significant shifts in the...

This paper analyses how financial inclusion in the Caucasus and Central Asia (CCA) compares to peers in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Using individual-level survey data, it shows that the probability of being financially included, as proxied by account ownership in financial institutions, is...