The working age population is expected to grow faster in the Middle East than in any other region in the world between now and 2015—rising annually by 2.7 percent, or 10 million people. This demographic explosion presents the region with a major challenge in terms of providing jobs, incomes,...

This paper studies the factors behind pro-cyclical but widely varying construction shares (as a percent of GDP) across countries, with a strong focus on European countries. Using a dataset covering 48 countries (including advanced and emerging economies within and outside Europe) for 1990-2011,...

Chile's small open economy with significant mismatch between the production and consumption baskets may be represented by three stylized sectors, a commodity sector, a non-commodity tradable sector, and a non-tradable sector. This paper estimates the effect of copper price shocks on mining,...

We propose a new approach to test the full-information rational expectations hypothesis which can identify whether rejections of the null arise from information rigidities. This approach quantifies the economic significance of departures from the null and the underlying degree of information...