Do discretionary spending cuts and tax increases hurt social well-being? To answer this question, we combine subjective well-being data covering over half a million of individuals across 13 European countries, with macroeconomic data on fiscal consolidations. We find that fiscal consolidations...

This paper estimates the causal effect of fiscal rules on political budget cycles in a sample of 67 developing countries over the period 1985-2007. We exploit the geographical pattern in the adoption of fiscal rules to isolate an exogenous source of variation in the adoption of national fiscal...

This paper investigates the impact of domestic fuel price increases on export growth in a sample of 77 developing countries over the period 2000-2014. Using a fixed-effect estimator and the local projection approach, we find that an increase in domestic gasoline or diesel price adversely affects...

This paper investigates the microeconomic origins of aggregate economic fluctuations inEurope. It examines the relevance of idiosyncratic shocks at the top 100 large firms (thegranular shocks) in explaining aggregate macroeconomic fluctuations. The paper alsoassesses the strength of spillovers...

Firms play an important role in shaping income inequality at the aggregated country level, given that wages represent a significant proportion of household income. We investigate the distributional consequences of capital account liberalization, relying on firm level data to explore the...

This paper examines the impact of Dollar exchange rate volatility on firm productivity in Emerging Markets economies (EMs). Using firm level data covering 16 EMs over the period 1998 -2019, the paper shows that dollar exchange rate volatility reduces firm productivity growth. Exploring channels,...

Monetary policy transmission in EMs has been found to be weak historically due to under-developed financial markets and heavy central bank intervention in FX markets that undermine the exchange rate channel. Against this background, this paper investigates the transmission of monetary policy,...