The rapid growth of Islamic banking has attracted much attention lately in the economic literature. At the same time, a mature body of the literature has shown that financial development is broadly conducive to economic growth, which raises the question as to whether a similar conclusion holds...

This paper identifies factors that contribute to a fast recovery in growth after persistent negative terms of trade shocks, using a sample of 159 countries for 1970-2006. The results suggest that policies matter. Fast recoveries are fairly robustly related to real exchange rate depreciation and...

This paper assesses how monetary policy outcomes affect fragility. Diving into the universe of the most prominent combinations of pursued monetary policy objectives across fragile settings, we examine the relationships between monetary policy outcomes and fragility and find the combination of...

While expanding public investment can help filling infrastructure bottlenecks, scaling up too much and too fast often leads to inefficient outcomes. This paper rationalizes this outcome looking at the association between cost inflation and public investment in a large sample of road construction...

This paper contributes to the literature by looking at the possible relevance of the structure of the financial system—whether financial intermediation is performed through banks or markets—for macroeconomic volatility, against the backdrop of increased policy attention on strengthening...