This paper examines the impact of trade on employment, wages, and other outcomes across countries and explores the conditions and policies that help spread the gains from trade more evenly throughout the population. We exploit a large global firm-level dataset to examine the impact of import...

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century puts forth a logically consistent explanation for changes in income and wealth inequality patterns. However, while rich in data, the book provides no formal empirical testing for its theoretical causal chain. In this paper, I build a set of...

This paper presents new results on the relationship between income inequality and education expansion-that is, increasing average years of schooling and reducing inequality of schooling. When dynamic panel estimation techniques are used to address issues of persistence and endogeneity, we find a...

This paper outlines an approach to assess uncertainty around a forecast baseline as well as the impact of alternative policy rules on macro variability. The approach allows for non-Gaussian shock distributions and non-linear underlying macroeconomic models. Consequently, the resulting...

In this paper we propose a novel approach to obtain the predictive density of global GDP growth. It hinges upon a bottom-up probabilistic model that estimates and combines single countries' predictive GDP growth densities, taking into account cross-country interdependencies. Speci?cally, we...

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...

The past two decades have seen a rapid increase in interest in financial inclusion, both from policymakers and researchers. This paper surveys the main findings from the literature, documenting the trends over time and gaps that have arisen across regions, income levels, and gender, among...

We study the channels that theoretically transmit the effects of inequality to economic growth, unlike much of the existing literature that focuses on the direct linkage. The role of inequality in these transmission channels is difficult to pin down and varies with the particular inequality...