Limiting climate change requires a 80 percent reduction in fossil fuel extraction until 2050. What are the macroeconomic consequences for fossil fuel producing countries? We identify 35 episodes of persistent, exogenous declines in extraction based on a new data-set for 13 minerals (oil, gas,...

This paper assesses how regional trade agreements (RTAs) impact growth volatility on a worldwide sample of 170 countries with data spanning the period 1978-2012.Notwithstanding concerns that trade openness through RTAs can heighten exposure to shocks, in particular when it leads to increased...

This paper studies the relationship between trade policy and food prices. We show that, when individuals are loss averse, governments may use trade policy to shield the domestic economy from large food price shocks. This creates a complementarity between the price of food in international...

Economic theory suggests that countries’ tariff commitments in trade agreements reflect their import market power at the time of negotiations. However, as countries grow, their market power in different sectors can change in unforeseen ways and their commitments may no longer reflect changed...

While expanding public investment can help filling infrastructure bottlenecks, scaling up too much and too fast often leads to inefficient outcomes. This paper rationalizes this outcome looking at the association between cost inflation and public investment in a large sample of road construction...

Profit shifting remains a key concern in international tax system debate, but discussions are largely based on aggregate estimates, with less attention paid to individual sectors. Drawing on a novel dataset, we quantify tax avoidance risks in the extractive industries, a sector which is revenue...

Mexico has large extractive industries and it traditionally has raised sizable fiscal revenues from the oil and gas sector. A confluence of factors—elevated commodity prices, financial challenges of the state-owned oil company Pemex, and revenue needs for financing social and public investment...

This paper assess how priorities of the IMF’s membership have evolved over the past two decades, by using text mining techniques on a unique dataset combining IMFC communiqués and constituency statements. Our results reveal significant variation in priorities across time and constituencies....

What are the potential benefits of increasing the taxation of a foreign extractive sector? This paper applies this question to the case of Guinea by using a multi-sector macro-inequality model with heterogeneous agents. We quantify the long-run equilibrium impact of additional taxation when the...

While new conventional wisdom warns that developing countries should be aware of the risks of premature capital account liberalization, the costs of not removing exchange controls have received much less attention. This paper investigates the negative effects of exchange controls on trade. To...