This paper explores the role of foreign aid and remittance inflows in the mitigation of the effects of food price shocks. Using a large sample of developing countries and mobilising dynamic panel data specifications, the econometric results yield two important findings. First, remittance and aid...

Global food aid is considered a critical consumption smoothing mechanism in many countries. However, its record of stabilizing consumption has been mixed. This paper examines the cyclical properties of food aid with respect to food availability in recipient countries, with a view to assessing...

We develop a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model with heterogeneous house-holds and multiple locations to study households' vulnerability to food insecurity from cli-mate shocks. In the model, households endogenously respond to negative climate shocks by drawing-down assets, importing...

This paper analyzes the domestic and external drivers of local staple food prices in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using data on domestic market prices of the five most consumed staple foods from 15 countries, this paper finds that external factors drive food price inflation, but domestic factors can...

In this paper we use a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents to assess the macroeconomic and welfare consequences in the United States of alternative fiscal policies over the medium-term. We find that failing to address the fiscal imbalances associated with current federal fiscal...

This paper provides the first empirical assessment of the impact of life expectancy assumptions on the liabilities of private U.S. defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using detailed actuarial and financial information provided by the U.S. Department of Labor, we construct a longevity variable...

This paper questions the view that leverage should have forewarned us of the global financial crisis of 2007-09, pointing to several gearing indicators that were neither useful portents of the onset of the crisis nor of its ferocity. Instead it shows, first, that the use of ill-suited collateral...

We examine the impact of banks' exposure to market liquidity shocks through wholesale funding on their supply of credit during the financial crisis in the United States. We focus on mortgage lending to minimize the impact of confounding demand factors that could potentially be large when...

News - or foresight - about future economic fundamentals can create rational expectations equilibria with non-fundamental representations that pose substantial challenges to econometric efforts to recover the structural shocks to which economic agents react. Using tax policies as a leading...

To date, an operational measure of systemic risk capturing non-linear tail comovement between system-wide and individual bank returns has not yet been developed. This paper proposes an extension of the so-called CoVaR measure that captures the asymmetric response of the banking system to...