COVID-19 relief legislation offers a unique setting to study how political representation shapes the distribution of federal assistance to state and local governments. We provide evidence of a substantial small-state bias: an additional Senator or Representative per million residents predicts an...

The COVID-19 pandemic as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine have had profound effects on the global energy landscape, with some of the longer-lasting effects still unfolding. This paper discusses how these events have reshaped the supply side of the global oil market by focusing on...

This paper presents new evidence on international trade and worker outcomes. It examines a big world event that produced an unprecedentedly large shock to the UK exchange rate. In the 24 hours in June 2016 during which the UK electorate unexpectedly voted to leave the European Union, the value...

This paper reviews some of the literature on the macroeconomic effects of oil price shocks with a particular focus on possible nonlinearities in the relation and recent new results obtained by Kilian and Vigfusson (2009)

Almost all countries announced fiscal support programs once COVID-19 hit. However, there was significant diversity in the magnitude and composition of these fiscal stimulus programs. These differences were determined by myriad political, financial, social, and economic factors - these factors...

We follow a representative panel of US borrowers to study the suspension of household debt payments (debt forbearance) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between March and October of 2020, loans worth $2 trillion entered forbearance. On average, cumulative payments missed per individual in...

In the United States, local government expenditures are heavily subsidized through a variety of sources. This paper explores theoretically and then simulates empirically the effects of eliminating either of two federal subsidies encouraging local government expenditures: (1) income tax...

In this paper we analyze the economic effects of different immigration policies using a model that incorporates economic and policy features crucial to understanding the migrant flows into the US. We differentiate among the most relevant channels of immigration to the US: family-based,...

The present paper analyzes the budgetary impact of various Social Security reforms in the Belgian institutional setting. Our approach relies on parameters that were derived in Dellis et alii (2002) using a micro-modeling strategy. focusing our attention on a hypothetical age cohort, we...