The entire difference between a mild downturn and a devastating crisis is the occurrence of sharp fire sales of domestic assets and possibly foreign exchange and the ensuing collapse in the balance sheets of both the financial and nonfinancial sector. Why and how do such crises materialize? And...

This paper underscores the importance of the assessment of incentives of the main agents in a financial system as a key element in the analysis of financial system vulnerability and the surveillance over the financial system. We outline a diagnostic approach for the assessment of incentives....

Using a new daily index of social unrest, we provide systematic evidence on the negative impact of social unrest on stock market performance. An average social unrest episode in an typical country causes a 1.4 percentage point drop in cumulative abnormal returns over a two-week event window....

We augment a linearized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with a tractable endogenous risk mechanism, to support the joint analysis of monetary and macroprudential policy. This state dependent conditional heteroskedasticity mechanism specifies the conditional variances of...

This paper discusses how the structure of the tax system affects its progressivity. It suggests a measure of progressive capacity of tax systems, based on the Kakwani index, but independent of pre-tax income distributions. Using this and other progressivity measures, the paper (i) documents a...

We posit that the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is mediated by the level of equality of opportunity, which we identify with intergenerational mobility. In economies characterized by intergenerational rigidities, an increase in income inequality has persistent...

This paper assesses a possible explanation for the global downward trend in top personal income tax rates over the last decades: globalization and the related tax evasion and avoidance opportunities could have raised elasticities of taxable income, which would imply lower optimal tax rates. The...

Using the between-sector variation in income as a new measure of economic uncertainty, this paper proposes simple models and supportive empirical evidence for the causal relations between economic uncertainty and government size in the open economy setting. Key empirical findings include: (1) a...

A country’s judiciary, police, and security forces are essential to protect the State from external aggression. By virtue of the State’s monopoly of coercion, they maintain a stable legal framework and the safety of persons and property. All these activities enhance a society’s...