We revisit the relationship between financial development and economic growth in a panel of 52 middle-income countries over the 1980–2008 period. Using pooled mean group estimations in a dynamic heterogeneous panel setting, we show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between...

We investigate the effect of financial development on economic growth in the context of Saudi Arabia, an oil-rich economy. In doing so, we distinguish between the effects of financial development on the oil and non-oil sectors of the economy. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL)...

This paper demonstrates, for a two-good, two-country model with finitely-lived agents, the possibility of using national debt as a policy instrument to improve welfare via an improvement in the terms of trade. The latter is large enough to outweigh the negative effect of crowding out of capital...

The role of fiscal policy is examined when public goods provide both productive and utility services. In the presence of congestion, the consumption tax is shown to be distortionary. Optimal fiscal policy involves using consumption-based instruments in conjunction with the income tax. An income...

In an endogenous growth framework with two public goods with differing productivities, this paper analytically characterizes optimal fiscal policy for a decentralized economy, whereby the optimal values of the growth rate, tax rate and expenditure shares on the two public goods are linked...

In an endogenous growth model with two public goods, we analytically derive the optimal composition of government spending in the presence of corruption. Although corruption results in a loss of productivity per se, an increase in corruption in the category of public spending that is harmed...