This paper, based on the introductory remarks made at the two-day conference on "The State of the Economy, the State of the World," is an idiosyncratic stocktaking of the trajectory of economics from Adam Smith to contemporary times, with special attention to the rise of development economics....

This paper reviews the literature relevant to understanding political constraints to economic reforms. Reform refers to changes in government policies or institutional rules because status quo policies and institutions are not working well to achieve the goals of economic well-being and...

Forced displacement-defined as the displacement of refugees and internally displaced persons due to violence-has reached an unprecedented scale and global attention during the past few years, particularly in the aftermath of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2011 and the European Union's migration...

This paper investigates the costs and benefits of three ex ante flood management strategies - risk-based insurance, zoning, and subsidized insurance - in an urban economics framework that takes land scarcity into account. In a theoretical setting and in the absence of market failures, risk-based...

This study uses Twitter data to provide a more nuanced understanding of the public reaction to the 2011 reform to the propane gas subsidy in El Salvador. By soliciting a small sample of manually tagged tweets, the study identifies the subject matter and sentiment of all tweets during six...

This paper combines local election results and geo-referenced road construction data over 1993-2012 to investigate political bias in road infrastructure investment in a democratic setting, focusing on the case of Mexico. Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper finds strong evidence of...

Although emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) weathered the global recession a decade ago relatively well, they now appear less well placed to cope with the substantial downside risks facing the global economy. In many EMDEs, the room for monetary and fiscal policies to respond to...

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of economic policy uncertainty on overall trade and trade linked to global value chains. Using new data on policy uncertainty for 18 countries and 24 years, it finds a statistically significant negative impact of policy uncertainty on overall trade...

Ethiopia's framework for managing its monetary and foreign exchange policy has relied on some standard instruments of financial repression. Over time, the framework has led to the buildup of large macro-financial imbalances. Exiting financial repression while maintaining macroeconomic stability...