During the global financial crisis, European banks contracted foreign claims on recipient economies sharply. This paper examines the impact of that deleveraging on credit supply in recipient economies, with a particular focus on Asia. Identification is achieved by exploiting heterogeneity in...

The “middle-income trap” is the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. In this study we examine the middle-income trap as a special case of growth slowdowns, which are identified as...

The age-distribution of Europe's workforce has shifted towards older workers over the past few decades, a process expected to accelerate in the years ahead. This paper studies the effect of the aging of the workforce on labor productivity, identifies the main transmission channels, and examines...

We posit that the relationship between income inequality and economic growth ismediated by the level of equality of opportunity, which we identify with intergenerationalmobility. In economies characterized by intergenerational rigidities, an increase in incomeinequality has persistent...

We argue that in an economy with downward nominal wage rigidity, the output gap is negative on average. Because it is more difficult to cut wages than to increase them, firms reduce employment more during downturns than they increase employment during expansions. This is demonstrated in a simple...

While standard demand factors perform well in predicting historical trade patterns, they fail conspicuously in 2020, when pandemic-specific factors played a key role above and beyond demand. Prediction errors from a multilateral import demand model in 2020 vary systematically with the health...

Kurzarbeit (KA), Germany’s short-time work program, is widely credited with saving jobs and supporting domestic demand during the COVID-19 recession. We quantify the impact by exploiting state-level variation in exposure to the pandemic shock and KA take-up. We construct a shift-share measure...

Forecasting macroeconomic variables is key to developing a view on a country's economic outlook.Most traditional forecasting models rely on fitting data to a pre-specified relationship between inputand output variables, thereby assuming a specific functional and stochastic process underlying...

We examine how the development of the digital infrastructure known as the “India Stack”—including an interoperable payments system, a universal digital ID, and other features—is delivering on the government’s objective to expand the provision of financial services. While each...

This paper builds a novel database on the effects of macroprudential policy drawing from 58 empirical studies, comprising over 6,000 results on a wide range of instruments and outcome variables. It encompasses information on statistical significance, standardized magnitudes, and other...