This paper studies the time-series behavior of a set of widely-used social indicators and uncovers two important stylized facts. First, not all social indicators are created equal in terms of the importance of cyclical fluctuations. While some social indicators such as the unemployment rate and...

An earlier paper titled "Non-linear effects of tax changes on output: The role of the initial level of taxation," estimated tax multipliers using (i) a novel dataset on value-added taxes for 51 countries (21 industrial and 30 developing) for the period 1970-2014, and (ii) the so-called narrative...

After mediocre growth in 2018 of 0.7 percent. LAC is expected to perform only marginally better in 2019(growth of 0.9 percent) followed by a much more solid growth of 2.1 percent in 2020. LAC will face bothinternal and external challenges during 2019. On the domestic front. the recession in...

Using non-linear methods, this paper finds that existing estimates of government spending multipliers in expansion and recession may yield biased results by ignoring whether government spending is increasing or decreasing. For industrial countries, the problem originates in the fact that,...