Epidemics may have social scarring effects, increasing the likelihood of social unrest. They may also have mitigating effect, suppressing unrest by dissuading social activities. Using a new monthly panel on social unrest in 130 countries, we find a positive cross-sectional relationship between...

We evaluate the direct employment effect of the public investment in key infrastructure-electricity, roads, schools and hospitals, and water and sanitation. Using rich firm-level panel data from 41 countries over 19 years, we estimate that USD 1 million of public spending in infrastructure...

With public debt soaring across the world, a growing concern is whether current debt levels are a harbinger of fiscal crises, thereby restricting the policy space in a downturn. The empirical evidence to date is however inconclusive, and the true cost of debt may be overstated if interest rates...

Despite growing interest among policymakers, there is no theory of independent fiscal institutions. The emerging literature on "fiscal councils" typically makes informal parallels with the theory of central bank independence, but a very simple formal example shows that such a shortcut is flawed....

Exploiting a granular panel dataset that breaks down capital inflows into FDI, portfolio and other categories, and distinguishes between credit to the household sector and to the corporate sector, we investigate the association between capital inflows and credit growth. We find that non-FDI...