We examine how financial expansion and contraction cycles affect the broader economy through their impact on 8 real economic sectors in a panel of 28 countries over 1960-2005, paying particular attention to large, or sharp, contractions and magnifying and mitigating factors. Overall, the...

This note shows that the aggregate fiscal expenditure stimulus in the United States, properly adjusted for the declining fiscal expenditure of the fifty states, was close to zero in 2009. While the Federal government stimulus prevented a net decline in aggregate fiscal expenditure, it did not...

We examine the open macroeconomic policy choices of developing economies from the perspective of the economic 'trilemma' hypothesis. We construct an index of divergence of the three trilemma policy choices, and evaluate its patterns in recent decades. We find that the three dimensions of the...

We develop a methodology that intuitively characterizes the choices countries have made with respect to the trilemma during the post Bretton-Woods period. The paper first outlines the new metrics for measuring the degree of exchange rate flexibility, monetary independence, and capital account...

This paper studies how capital market imperfections affect the welfare effects of forming a currency union. The analysis considers a bank-only world where intermediaries compete in Cournot fashion and monitoring and state verification are costly. The first part determines the credit market...

This paper applies a probit estimation to assess the relationship between economic takeoffs during 1950- 2000 and inflows of portfolio debt, portfolio equity, and FDI, controlling for country's stock of short-term external debt and commodity terms of trade. Average level of FDI inflows is...

This paper studies the endogenous determination of financial and trade openness. First, we outline channels leading to two-way feedbacks between the different modes of openness; next, we identify these feedbacks empirically. We find that one standard deviation increase in commercial openness is...

In this paper we compare the diversification patterns of agents who maximize a generalized expected utility (GEU) with the diversification patterns of agents who follow the CAPM. We consider two identical countries with equity returns having the same mean and variance in terms of their domestic...

This paper investigates the association between greater income inequality, de-facto fiscal space, and sovereign spreads. Using data from 50 countries in 2007, 2009 and 2011, we find that higher income inequality is associated with a lower tax base, lower de-facto fiscal space, and higher...

This paper investigates the potential impacts of the degree of divergence in open macroeconomic policies in the context of the trilemma hypothesis. Using an index that measures the relative policy divergence among the three trilemma policy choices, namely monetary independence, exchange rate...