Sweden represents an archetypal welfare state economy, with extensive government safety nets. Some scholars have attributed a decline in its per capita income ranking since 1970 to ""eurosclerosis"" or sluggish growth caused by distortionary policies. This paper argues rather, that the permanent...

Data for the United States and countries in Western Europe indicate a negative correlation between the dependency ratio and both labor tax rates and the generosity of social transfers, after controlling for other factors that influence the size of the welfare state. This is despite the increased...

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...

External headwinds, together with domestic vulnerabilities, have loomed over the prospects of emerging markets in recent years. We propose an empirical toolbox to quantify the impact of external macro-financial shocks on domestic economies in parsimonious way. Our model is a Bayesian VAR...

We produce a social unrest risk index for 125 countries covering a period of 1996 to 2020. The risk of social unrest is based on the probability of unrest in the following year derived from a machine learning model drawing on over 340 indicators covering a wide range of macro-financial,...

Do governments in Latin America tend to be optimistic when preparing budgetary projections? We address this question by constructing a novel dataset of the authorities' fiscal forecasts in six Latin American economies using data from annual budget documents over the period 2000-2018. In turn, we...