This brief by Yeva Nersisyan and Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray argues that deficits do not burden future generations with debt, nor do they crowd out private spending. The authors base their conclusions on the premise that a sovereign nation with its own currency cannot become insolvent, and...

Senior Scholar James K. Galbraith argues the fundamental illusion of viewing the US economy through the free-market prism of deregulation, privatization, and a benevolent government operating mainly through monetary stabilization - the prevailing view among economists over the past three...

This paper develops a model of the relationship between the age of a dictator and economic growth. In the model a dictator must spread the resources of the economy over his reign but faces mortality and political risk. The model shows that if the time horizon of the dictator decreases, either...

This paper investigates the causal influence of export concentration on measures of aggregate volatility. Geographically disadvantaged countries often have a concentrated export structure which makes them more vulnerable to external shocks. Identifying causal effects of export concentration on...

We assess whether bilateral and multilateral donors of foreign aid specialized and coordinated their activities with other donors as agreed in the Paris Declaration of 2005. We account for donor heterogeneity, varying aid priorities and recipient characteristics in order to isolate changes in...

We study the well-known multiplicative Lognormal cascade process in which the multiplication of Gaussian and Lognormally distributed random variables yields time series with intermittent bursts of activity. Due to the non-stationarity of this process and the combinatorial nature of such a...

The gender wage gap varies widely across countries and across skill groups within countries. Interestingly, there is a positive cross-country correlation between the unskilled-to-skilled gender wage gap and the corresponding gap in hours worked. Based on a canonical supply and demand framework,...

In this paper we analyse the short- and long-run relationship between employment growth, inflation and output growth in Phillips' tradition. For this purpose we apply FMOLS, DOLS, PMGE, MGE, DFE, and VECM methods to a nonstationary heterogeneous dynamic panel including annual data for 119...

This paper studies the eff ects of foreign competition on self-employment levels. We begin by pointing out a previously unknown fact: the greater the exposure to foreign competition, the smaller the fraction of self-employed people. This fact holds across very different countries, across...

This paper studies the effects of tariffs on intra-firm trade. Building on the Antràs and Helpman (2004) North-South theoretical framework, I show that higher Northern tariffs reduce the incentives for outsourcing and offshoring, while higher Southern tariffs have the opposite effects. I also...