We study the effects on financial markets and real economic activity of changes in risk related to political events and policy announcements in Italy during the 2013-2019 period that saw the rise to power of populist parties. We focus on events that have implications for budgetary policy, debt...

The policy of sustainable development requires reductions in growth of human populations to promote environmental sustainability and economic development. The objective is to control environmental catastrophism and advance financial growth with population policies on a global scale to foster...

Advanced economies face two important trends: population aging and rising debt. In the coming years it will be critical to understand how policies undertaken by governments interact with their changing age structures. In a panel of advanced economies, I show that fiscal deficit consolidation...

This paper studies the role of pensions and income taxes in determining homeownership and household wealth. It provides a cross-country analysis, using tax and pension policy designs in Germany, the US and Australia. These developed nations have similar incomes per capita but very different...

We show that a reduction in lender of last resort (LOLR) policy uncertainty posi-tively affects bank lending and propagates to investment and employment. We exploita unique policy that reduced uncertainty regarding the availability of future LOLRfunding for banks as a quasi-natural experiment....

This paper compares the depth of the recent crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the recent crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

Tiny changes in the American monetary policy can have dramatic effects on the rest of the world because of dollar's double role of national and international currency. This is the Triffin dilemma. The paper shows how it works through three examples: price of commodities, dollarization, and the...

This paper compares the depth of the Recent Crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the Recent Crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

We confirm the negative relationship between household debt and future GDP growth documented in Mian, Sufi, and Verner (2017) for a wider set of countries over the period 1950-2016. Three mutually reinforcing mechanisms help explain this relationship. First, debt overhang impairs household...

Acquiring assets on a worldwide scale is strategically important for any country's fruitful implementation of plans for manifold growth and development. It is essential for energy security and sufficiency. With the widespread scarcity of oil sources in the non-OPEC countries acquisition of oil...