Benchmarking is intended to help gauge where economies rank relative to others. However, historically educational benchmarking has often elected to use indicators based on their ease of availability, rather than a clear and defined link between inputs and learning outcomes. In this paper, we...

Beyond years of schooling, educational content can play an important role in the process of economic development. Individuals ́choices of educational content are often shaped by the political economy of government policies that determine the incentives to acquire various skills. We first...

We investigate the role of global value chains in the declines of manufacturing employment and output in the U.S. during COVID-19. Specifically, we identify the role of global value chains by exploiting heterogeneity across industries in cross-country sourcing patterns and its interaction with...

We build a new empirical model to estimate the global impact of an increase in the volatility of US monetary policy shocks. Specifically, we admit time-varying variances of local structural shocks from a stochastic volatility specification. By allowing for rich dynamic interaction between the...

The US economic expansion which began in 2009 was unusually prolonged but relatively weak. Profitability and investment strengthened between 2010 and 2015 but then began to falter. After Trump took office in 2017 there was a minor recovery in investment but the proceeds of major tax cuts were...

This paper exploits the unexpected decline of deaths from cardiovascular diseases since the 1970s as a large positive health shock that affected predominantly old-age mortality; i.e., the fourth stage of the epidemiological transition. Using a differences-in-differences estimation strategy, we...