This paper presents a simple model with financial frictions where inflation increases the cost faced by firms holding liquid assets to hedge risky production against expenditure shocks. Inflation tilts firms' technology choice away from innovative activities and toward safer but return-dominated...

This paper proposes a sovereign asset and liability management framework for analyzing the inter-relationships between debt management, fiscal and monetary policies. It illustrates the consequences of uncoordinated policy mix and extends Sargent and Wallace (1981 and 1993) by including debt...

This paper analyzes the procyclicality of fiscal policy on the tax and spending sides in a sample of 116 developing countries between 2000 and 2016. About 20 percent of the countries in the sample switched from procyclical to countercyclical policy stance. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 30 of 39...

The author describes a spread-sheet planning model to help determine the government deficit consistent with a policymaker's "vector" of principal macroeconomic objectives (including real GDP growth, inflation, exchange rate, and international reserve accumulation). The model focuses on the...

With the benefit of hindsight, this paper provides a fresh and comprehensive look at the causes of the 2014-16 collapse in oil prices and its impact on the global economy. It disentangles the contribution of supply and demand factors, assesses the impact on activity in oil exporters and oil...

Transfers to individuals were a larger part of the 2009 U.S. stimulus package than government purchases. Using a two-agent New Keynesian model, this paper shows analytically that the multiplier on targeted transfers to financially constrained households is (i) larger than the purchase multiplier...

This paper is the first to quantify the relationship between the incidence of the digital economy and long-term frictional unemployment across countries. The resulting evidence indicates that there is a robust, negative partial correlation between national unemployment rates and the incidence of...

Proxy-means testing is a popular method of poverty targeting with imperfect information. In a now widely-used version, a regression for log consumption calibrates a proxy-means test score based on chosen covariates, which is then implemented for targeting out-of-sample. In this paper, the...

This paper contributes to the predominant diversification debate that has been ongoing in Trinidad and Tobago for more than three decades. The paper makes a determination of the key impediments to the country's attempts at diversification. Econometric techniques are applied on panel data to...

Traditionally, governments seek to mobilize tax revenues by expanding their enforcement of existing tax regimes and facilitating tax payments. However, enforcement and facilitation can be costly and produce diminishing marginal returns if citizens are unwilling to pay their taxes. This paper...