In 2011 the Government of El Salvador implemented a reform to the liquefied gas (LPG) subsidy that increased the welfare of households in all but the top two deciles of the income distribution. However, the reform turned out to be rather unpopular, including among winners. This paper relies on...

I propose a state-space approach to test for international risk sharing at different horizons. Running the tests on US data <italic>vis-à-vis</italic> the rest of the world, I find that market incompleteness is pervasive: the null is rejected at all horizons.

During a natural disaster, the negative supply shock due to the destruction of productive capacity is counteracted by a positive demand shock due to public grants for assistance and reconstruction positing an identification issue in empirical work. Focusing on the 2009 'Aquilano' earthquake in...

Although earthquakes are large idiosyncratic shocks for affected regions, little is known of their impact on economic activity. Seismic events are rare, the data is crude (the Richter scale measures the magnitude but says nothing of the associated damages) and counterfactuals are often entirely...

Argentina's government has resorted to fiscal policy as a countercyclical tool to mitigate the negative impact of the current economic downturn on aggregate demand. Empirical results based on a vector error correction model suggest, however, that the fiscal multiplier is relatively small and...

I study the asset approach to exchange rates in the time--frequency domain. Using Australian data, I show that the Granger causality runs from the exchange rate to commodity prices -- a proxy for economic fundamentals. This result holds at any point in time at business cycle and higher...

Soaring commodity prices in 2007 and 2008 raised concerns that volatility was also rising, which would have implications for welfare and therefore for the design of public policy interventions. The literature focuses on trends in commodity prices rather than their volatility characteristics....

During a natural disaster, the negative supply shock due to the destruction of productive capacity is counteracted by a positive demand shock due to public grants for assistance and reconstruction, positing an identification issue in empirical work. Focusing on the 2009 ’Aquilano’ earthquake...

A law issued to allocate reconstruction grants following the 2009 "Aquilano" earthquake has resulted in a large and unanticipated discontinuity across municipalities with comparable damages. Using diff-in-diff analysis we estimate the "local spending" and the "local tax" multipliers--according...