This paper uses life satisfaction data to help the design of climate mitigation policies in the United Kingdom. We assess the effects of the exposure to ambient pollutants on long-term life satisfaction and short-term mental health in the UK. We estimate augmented Cobb-Douglas utility functions...

An opening of Cuba to U.S. tourism would represent a seismic shift in the Caribbean's tourism industry. This study models the impact of such a potential opening by estimating a counterfactual that captures the current bilateral restriction on tourism between the two countries. After controlling...

This study measures the impact of changing economic conditions in OECD countries on tourist arrivals to countries/destinations in Latin America and the Caribbean. A model of utility maximization across labor, consumption of goods and services at home, and consumption of tourism services across...

A well-functioning public expenditure management (PEM) system is considered a critical pillar of government efficiency, on par with a low-distortion tax system and efficient tax administration. The paper discusses PEM systems in developing countries using an analytical framework based on...

We show the importance of a dynamic aggregation bias in accounting for the PPP puzzle. We prove that established time-series and panel methods substantially exaggerate the persistence of real exchange rates because of heterogeneity in the dynamics of disaggregated relative prices. When...

Unit value export and import indices compiled from returns to customs authorities are often used as surrogates for price indices in the measurement of inflation transmission, terms of trade (effects), and to deflate import and export value series to derive volume series. Their widespread use is...

This paper investigates whether Indonesia’s recent currency crisis was due to domestic fundamentals, common external shocks (“monsoons”), or contagion from neighboring countries. Markov-switching models attribute speculative pressure on Indonesia’s currency to domestic political and...

The forward premium is a notoriously poor predictor of exchange rate movements. This failure must reflect deviations from risk neutrality and/or rational expectations. In addition, a mechanism is needed that generates the appropriate correlation between the forward premium and shocks arising...

We estimate a latent factor model that decomposes international stock returns into global, country-, and industry-specific shocks and allows for stock-specific exposures to these shocks. We find that across stocks there is substantial dispersion in these exposures, which is partly explained by...

We propose using a Bayesian time-varying coefficient model estimated with Markov chain-Monte Carlo methods to measure contagion empirically. The proposed measure works in the joint presence of heteroskedasticity and omitted variables and does not require knowledge of the timing of the crisis. It...