This paper assesses Brazil's growth performance from a long-term perspective, using crosscountry and panel estimation techniques, building on the vast empirical literature on growth. The empirical evidence presented in this paper confirms that macroeconomic stability and several reforms have...

This paper uses an untapped source of satellite-recorded nightlights and gas flaring data to characterize the contraction of economic activity in Yemen throughout the ongoing conflict that erupted in 2015. Using estimated nightlights elasticities on a sample of 72 countries for real GDP and 28...

Does the distribution of income within a country become more equal as it grows richer? This paper uses plausibly exogenous variations in trade-weighted world income and international oil price shocks as instruments for within-country variations in countries' real GDP per capita to examine this...

In this paper we propose a novel approach to obtain the predictive density of global GDP growth. It hinges upon a bottom-up probabilistic model that estimates and combines single countries' predictive GDP growth densities, taking into account cross-country interdependencies. Specifically,we...

This paper uses panel data for 19 OECD countries and finds support for the hypothesis that a greater degree of product variety relative to the United States helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from...

This paper presents a novel framework to estimate the elasticity between nighttime lights and quarterly economic activity. The relationship is identified by accounting for varying degrees of measurement errors in nighttime light data across countries. The estimated elasticity is 1.55 for...

Economic policies are often judged by a handful of statistics, some of which may be biased during periods of change. We estimate the income growth implied by the evolution of food demand and durable good ownership in post-reform Brazil and Mexico, and find that changes in consumption patterns...

Flows of development financing from the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) to low income countries (LICs) have surged in recent years. Unlike aid from traditional donors, BRICs (excluding Russia) view their financing as primarily based on the principles of South-South cooperation, focusing...

This paper assesses the extent to which Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)'s business cycle is synchronized with that of the rest of the world (RoW). Findings suggest that SSA's business cycle has not only moved in the same direction as that of the RoW, but has also gradually drifted away from the G7 in...

This paper investigates the empirical characteristics of income inequality in China and a panel of BRIC countries over the period 1980–2013, with a focus on the redistributive contribution of fiscal policy. Using instrumental variable techniques to deal with potential endogeneity, we find...