Conventional wisdom suggests that compulsory voting lowers the influence of specialinterest groups and leads to policies that are better for less privileged citizens, who often abstain when voting is voluntary. To scrutinize this conventional wisdom, I study public goods provision and rents to...

To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850...

Over time the international development community has advocated various development paradigms, but countries following these paradigms have often performed poorly. I provide an explanation for this poor performance. In my model the political leader of a developing country chooses a policy and...

This paper assesses whether the allocation puzzle - the tendency for capital to flow to countries with relatively low productivity growth - is observed for foreign direct investment (FDI) flows, which should be particularly sensitive to productivity prospects. We look both at aggregate FDI flows...

This paper analyzes the citation patterns of the central banks of the 15 largest monetary areas of the world that had an active working paper series in 2010. It proceeds to construct a novel journal ranking that is more suited for monetary authorities than the academic journal rankings currently...

We analyze the short and long run effects of demographic ageing—increased longevity and reduced fertility—on per-capita growth. The OLG model captures direct effects, working through adjustments in the savings rate, labor supply, and capital deepening, and indirect effects, working through...

What is the impact of import competition from low-wage countries (LWCs) on inflationary pressure in Europe? This paper examines whether labor- intensive exports from emerging Europe, Asia, and other global regions have a uniform impact on producer prices in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and...

The 100%-Money Plan advocated by Fisher (1936) has a Misesian avor as it aims at mitigating intertemporal discoordination by reducing (i) the discrepancy between investment and voluntary savings, and (ii) the manipulation of interest rates by monetary injections. Recent proposals to adopt the...

We develop a sovereign debt model with official and private creditors where default risk depends on both the level and the composition of liabilities. Higher exposure to official lenders improves incentives to repay but carries extra costs, such as reduced ex-post flexibility. The model implies...

This paper develops an empirical framework giving rise to a nonlinear behaviour of the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT). Rather than shifts between low and high infl ation, the nonlinearity arises when large swings in the exchange rate trigger market entries and exits of importing firms....