We analyze the degree to which the growing importance of sovereign wealth funds [SWFs] and the diffusion of inflation targeting and augmented Taylor rules have impacted the post crisis adjustment of Latin American Countries (LATAM) to the challenges associated with terms of trade and financial...

In this paper, I develop a new identification method to solve the problem of simultaneous equations, based on heteroskedasticity of the structural shocks. I show that if the heteroskedasticity can be described as a two-regime process, then the system is just identified under relatively weak...

The paper argues that global financial factors played an important role in the capital-inflow episode in Emerging Market economies (EMs), during the early part of the 1990s, and clearly in the Sudden Stop (of capital inflows) crises that took place after the 1998 Russian crisis. Moreover, the...

We model the motives for residents of a country to hold foreign assets, including the precautionary motive that has been omitted from much previous literature as intractable. Our model captures many of the principal insights from the existing specialized literature on the precautionary motive,...

Using new transaction data I find that consumption is excessively sensitive to salient, predetermined, large and regular payments from the Alaska Permanent Fund, with a large average marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of 30% for nondurables and services. This excess sensitivity is very...

Starting in 1982, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend allows each full-time resident in Alaska, including infants born in the qualifying year, to receive a sizable dividend. This dividend, which represents a form of a Universal Basic Income on a small scale, could alter incentives surrounding...

Set-asides and subsidies are used extensively in government procurement and natural resource sales. We analyze these policies in an empirical model of U.S. Forest Service timber auctions. The model fits the data well both within the sample of unrestricted sales where we estimate the model, and...

We develop a consistent and comprehensive theoretical framework for assessing whether economic growth is compatible with sustaining well-being over time. The framework focuses on whether a comprehensive measure of wealth - one that accounts for natural capital and human capital as well as...