This paper reviews evidence from 44 middle income countries on how the recent financial crisis affected jobs and workers' income. In addition to providing a rare assessment of the magnitude of the impact across several middle-income countries, the paper describes how labor markets adjusted and...

This article documents recent developments in emerging markets in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, assesses their prospects and challenges, and discusses appropriate policy settings for the medium term. It argues that EM policymakers' ability to grapple with an incomplete and uneven...

This paper aims to provide a critical overview of the drivers that the relevant theoretical and empirical literature suggests being crucial in dealing with the challenges an emerging country may encounter in its attempts to further catch-up a higher income status, with a particular focus devoted...

Labor markets in low- and middle income countries are characterized by high levels of informality. A multitude of interventions have therefore been implemented in many countries with the objective to increase the formalization of firms and workers, including information campaigns, simplification...

Our objective is to analyse the role of teacher and school quality to explain differences in students' educational outcomes. With this aim, we use PISA microdata for 10 middle income and 2 high income countries and we apply decomposition methods in order to identify the role of these factors for...

The US economy is often referred to as the "banker to the world," due to its unique role in supplying global reserve assets and funding foreign risky investment. This paper develops a general equilibrium model to analyze and quantify the contribution of this role to rising wealth concentration...

Classical theories of monetary economics predict that real stock returns are negatively correlated with inflation when monetary policy is countercyclical. Previous empirical studies mostly focus on a small group of developed countries or a few countries with hyperinflation. In this paper, I...

Building on the vast literature, this paper focuses on the role of the structure of the international investment position (IIP) in affecting countries' external vulnerabilities. Using a sample of 73 advanced and emerging economies and new database on the IIP's currency composition, we find that...

We analyze the long-run impact of emerging-market sovereign bond yields on corporate bond yields, finding that the average pass-through is around one. The pass-through is larger in countries with greater sovereign risks and where sovereign bonds are more liquid. It is also greater for corporate...