This paper investigates the causes of extreme fluctuations in commodity prices from 1990 to 2010. Analyzing two very distinct commodities-crude oil and fine wine, we find that macroeconomic factors are the main determinants of commodity prices. Although supply constraints have the expected...

This paper investigates the empirical characteristics of business cycles and the extent of cyclical comovement in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, using nonhydrocarbon GDP (excluding crude oil and natural gas sectors) and constituents of aggregate demand during the period 1990~2010....

This paper investigates the determinants of fiscal policy behavior and its time-varying volatility, using panel data for a broad set of advanced and emerging market economies during the period 1990–2012. The empirical results show that discretionary fiscal policy is influenced by policy...

Libya is highly dependent on exhaustible and volatile hydrocarbon resources, which constitute the bulk of government revenues. Although resource wealth provides the means to promote socio-economic development, procyclical fiscal policies threaten macroeconomic stability as well as fiscal...

This paper examines the empirical behavior of conventional bank deposit rates and the rate of return on retail Islamic profit-and-loss sharing (PLS) investment accounts in Malaysia and Turkey, using monthly data from January 1997 to August 2010. The analysis shows that conventional bank deposit...

Using a novel municipality-level panel dataset, this paper investigates the empirical characteristics of vertical fiscal imbalances (VFIs) in Moldova over the period 2005–2013. The results show that the extent of variation in VFIs across 898 municipalities can be explained by the level of per...

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between military spending and economic growth in a large panel of advanced and developing countries over the period 1984–2014, with a particular focus on whether the growth impact of military expenditures varies with the type and level of...

Literature on whether government spending crowds out or crowds in the private sector is large, but still without an unambiguous conclusion. Using firm-level data from Ukraine, this paper provides a granular empirical investigation to disentangle the impact of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on...

This paper investigates the impact of taxation on firm survival, using hazard models and a large-scale panel dataset on over 4 million nonfinancial firms from 21 countries over the period 1995-2015. We find ample evidence that a lower level of effective marginal tax rate improves firms' survival...

This paper discusses the benefits and challenges of implementing a rule-based fiscal responsibility framework, using the Philippines as a case study. It estimates structural measures of the fiscal stance over the period 1980-2016 and applies a stochastic simulation model to determine the optimal...