COVID-19 has had a disruptive economic impact in 2020, but how long its impact will persist remains unclear. We offer a prognosis based on an analysis of the effects of five previous major epidemics in this century. We find that these pandemics led to significant and persistent reductions in...

We construct unanticipated government spending shocks for 103 developing countries from 1990 to 2015 and study their effects on income distribution. We find that unanticipated fiscal consolidations lead to a long-lasting increase in income inequality, while fiscal expansions lower inequality....

This paper provides new evidence on the existence and magnitude of the 'twin deficits' in developing economies. It finds that a one percent of GDP unanticipated increase in the government budget balance improves, on average, the current account balance by 0.8 percentage point of GDP. This effect...

This paper provides new empirical evidence of the macroeconomic effects of public investment in developing economies. Using public investment forecast errors to identify unanticipated changes in public investment, the paper finds that increased public investment raises output in the short and...

The aim of this paper is to provide new estimates of employment-output elasticities and assess the effect of structural and macroeocnomic policies on the employment-intensity of growth. Using an unbalanced panel of 167 countries over the period 1991 - 2009, the results suggest that structural...

While the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all countries, output losses vary considerably across countries. We provide a first analysis of robust determinants of observed initial output losses using model-averaging techniques-Weighted Average Least Squares and Bayesian Model Averaging. The results...