Historically, many countries have suffered a pattern of procyclical fiscal policy: spending too much in booms and then forced to cut back in recessions, thereby exacerbating the business cycle. This problem has especially plagued Latin American commodity-producers. Since 2000, fiscal policy in...

Biofuels have become big policy and big business. Government targets, mandates, and blending quotas have created a growing demand for biofuels. Some say that the U.S. biofuels industry was created by government policies. But recently, biofuels have become increasingly controversial. In this...

We show that world trade network datasets contain empirical evidence that the dynamics of innovation in the world economy follows indeed the concept of creative destruction, as proposed by J.A. Schumpeter more than half a century ago. National economies can be viewed as complex, evolving...

In this paper we document that the probability that a product is added to a country’s export basket is, on average, 65% larger if a neighboring country is a successful exporter of that same product. We interpret our result as evidence of international intra-industry knowledge diffusion....

By putting together a relatively large data set on bilateral remittances of emigrants, this paper is able to shed light on the important hypothesis of smoothing. The smoothing hypothesis is that remittances are countercyclical with respect to income in the worker’s country of origin (the...

The pollution haven hypothesis suggests that unilateral domestic emission mitigation policies could cause adverse “competitiveness†impacts on domestic manufacturers as they lose market share to foreign competitors and relocate production activity – and emissions – to...

When international observers criticize the quality of elections, do these expert evaluations reflect ‘Western/American’ values? Or are there universal global norms of electoral integrity and malpractice which are shared by ordinary people living in diverse cultures? To consider...

The possibility that the renminbi may soon join the ranks of international currencies has generated much excitement. This paper looks to history for help in evaluating the factors determining its prospects. The three best precedents in the twentieth century were the rise of the dollar from 1913...

Indonesia’s financial sector has two paradoxes: 1) Indonesia has been a global leader in microfinance for the past 25 years, but access to microfinance services is declining; and 2) Indonesia’s commercial banks are liquid, solvent, and profitable, and the Indonesian economy has...

It is conventional wisdom that it is possible to reduce exposure to indoor air pollution, improve health outcomes, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in the rural areas of developing countries through the adoption of improved cooking stoves. This belief is largely supported by observational...