positions that require small reallocations. In such circumstances, welfare can increase if the government steps in, purchases private assets on its own account, and resells them when the economy recovers.

We document cross-country differences in informal activity, government policies and institutions using a data set covering 127 countries. Five key facts emerge from this data set. Better institutions are associated with lower inflation, higher income tax rates and less informal activity. Related...

productivity: a new technology is "more risky" and more productive on average. In this context, the adoption of the new technology from a low level of income (close to subsistence) generates a gradual increase in the investment to output ratio.

At any given point of time in an actual economy, some individuals hold more money than other individuals do. This non-degenerate distribution of money holdings among individuals is a rationale for a range of policies designed for reallocating liquidity among individuals. However, monetary theory...

Between 1958 and 1961, China experienced one of its worst famines in history. Birth rates plummeted during these years, but recovered immediately afterwards. The famine-born cohorts were relatively scarce in the marriage and labor markets. The famine also adversely affected the health of these...

there is enough cross-sectional variation of the observed states.

We develop a monetary DSGE model with a maturity structure of long-term government debt and analyse the incentives of a government to reduce it real debt burden by increasing inflation temporarily. The success of such a policy crucially depends on the maturity structure of public debt and on the...

This paper shows that public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals consume both public and private goods. The government's involvement in the provision of private goods provides it with information about individuals' private...

functions that allows productivity to be multi-dimensional. Using firm-level panel data, we are able to directly assess the bias of technological change by measuring, at the level of the individual firm, how much of technological change is factor neutral and how much of it is labor augmenting....