Volatile and rising agricultural prices place significant strain on the global fight against poverty. An accurate reading of future food price movements would thus be an invaluable budgetary planning tool for government agencies and food aid programs aimed at alleviating hunger. Using the...

We construct a unified overlapping-generations (OLG) framework of equilibrium growth that includes the Blanchard �perpetual youth� model, the Samuelson model, and the infinitely-lived representative agent growth model as limit specifications of a �realistic�, two-parameter...

Motivated by Japan's economic experiences and policy debates over the past two decades, this paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium open economy model to examine the volatility and welfare impact of alternative monetary policies. To capture the dynamic effects of likely structural breaks in...

This paper demonstrates that “commodity currency” exchange rates have remarkably robust power in predicting future global commodity prices, both in-sample and out-of-sample. A critical element of our in-sample approach is to allow for structural breaks, endemic to empirical exchange rate...

This paper analyzes the growth and inequality tradeoff for a small open economy where agents differ in their initial endowments of capital stock and international bond-holdings. Our analysis focuses on the distributional impacts of different structural shocks through their effects on...

The nominal exchange rate is both a macroeconomic variable equilibrating international markets and a financial asset that embodies expectations and prices risks associated with cross border currency holdings. Recognizing this, we adopt a joint macro-finance strategy to model the exchange rate....

This paper examines how the occurrence of natural disasters affect health status of children using data from Guatemala. Despite a large literature on child health there is relatively little work on how shocks from natural hazards affect the health of children. Using three rounds of DHS data...

Previous research on sex selective abortions has ignored the interactions between fertility, birth spacing and sex selection. This paper presents a novel approach that jointly estimates the determinants of sex selective abortions, fertility and birth spacing, using data from India's National...