Sovereign debt restructurings have been shown to influence the dynamics of imports and exports. This paper shows that the impact can vary substantially depending on whether the restructuring takes place preemptively without missing payments to creditors, or whether it takes place after a default...

This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop tests for threshold effects in the...

We leverage insights from machine learning to optimize the tradeoff between bias and variance when estimating economic models using pooled datasets. Specifically, we develop a simple algorithm that estimates the similarity of economic structures across countries and selects the optimal pool of...

We test the existence of the balance sheet channel of monetary policy in a middle-income country. Firm-level data scarcity and quality, in such a context, make the identification of this channel a steep challenge. To circumvent this challenge, we use panel instrumental variables estimation with...

This paper assesses the real effects of the energy reform in Mexico by looking at its impact on manufacturing output through changes in energy prices. Using sub-sector and state-level manufacturing output data, along with past variation in energy prices, we find electricity prices--relative to...

Standard models-based exclusively on macro-financial variables-have made little progress in explaining the behavior of exchange rates. In this paper, we introduce a neglected set of 'soft power' factors capturing a country's demographic, institutional, political and social underpinnings to...