This paper surveys the academic and policy debate on the origins of global imbalances, their prospects after the global crisis, and their policy implications. A conventional view of global imbalances considers them to primarily result from macroeconomic policies and cyclical forces that cause...

This paper examines within-sector resource misallocation in three Southeast Asian countries -- Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. The methodology accounts for measurement error in revenues and costs. The firm-level evidence suggests that measurement error is substantial, resulting in an...

The quest for status is a powerful motivator, but does it affect inequality? This paper presents a novel lab experiment that was designed and conducted to identify the relationship between inequality, status signaling, debt, and conspicuous consumption. It reports three main findings: First,...

This paper explores the spillover of protests across countries using data on nonviolent and spontaneous demonstrations for 200 countries from 2000 to 2020. Using an autoregressive spatial model, the analysis finds strong evidence of "contagious protests," with a catalyzing role of social media....

This paper explores the dynamics of media chatter about economic reforms using text analysis from about a billion newspaper articles in 28 languages. The paper shows that the intensity of reform chatter increases during economic downturns. This increase is more significant in democracies. Using...

Using a new data set of 207 national elections across 50 democracies, this paper is the first to systematically examine the effects of oil price shocks on incumbents’ political fortunes in developed oil-importing countries. We find that oil price increases systematically lower the odds of...

This paper examines the impacts of U.S.-China trade tensions via the lens of East Asian stock markets. Studying 10 indices of the main East Asian stock markets, it finds that announcements of "trade war" escalation translated into 50 to 60 percent of the total declines in two major Chinese stock...

This paper documents the existence of a "middle-income trap" for the Middle East and North Africa region. It argues that the economic woes of the Middle East and North Africa offer new insights into the debate on the trap which has thus far focused on the East Asia and Pacific region. The...