This paper analyses potential internal and external determinants of institutional change as measured by the World Bank Governance Indicators (WBGI) based on a panel of 25 transition countries for the period from 1996 to 2005. We show that natural resources and capital inflows exert an...

This paper provides a critical analysis of the possible methods, data sources and the existing results of the field of 'the economic costs of mass violent conflict' by identifying strengths and weaknesses of the existing literature. The report evaluates content, methods, and data sources of the...

Structural DSGE models are used for analyzing both policy and the sources of business cycles. Conclusions based on full structural models are, however, potentially affected by misspecification. A competing method is to use partially identified SVARs based on narrative shocks. This paper asks...

In federal countries, such as the U.S., the fiscal authority consists not of one, but many governments, with state governments accounting for a sizable share of expenditures. We analyze how state partisanship of politicians affects state fiscal policy and quantify the possible macroeconomic...

We propose to add ranking restrictions on impulse-responses to sign restrictions to narrow the identified set in vector autoregressions (VARs). Ranking restrictions come from micro data on heterogeneous industries in VARs, bounds on elasticities, or restrictions on dynamics. Using both a fully...

Structural DSGE models are used for analyzing both policy and the sources of business cycles. Conclusions based on full structural models are, however, potentially affected by misspecification. A competing method is to use partially identified SVARs based on narrative shocks. This paper asks...

We propose to add ranking restrictions on impulse‐responses to sign restrictions to narrow the identified set in vector autoregressions (VARs). Ranking restrictions come from micro data on heterogeneous industries in VARs, bounds on elasticities, or restrictions on dynamics. Using both a fully...

We argue that social and political risk causes significant aggregate fluctuations by changing workers’ bargaining power. Using a Bayesian proxy-VAR estimated with U.S. data, we show how distribution shocks trigger output and unemployment movements. To quantify the aggregate importance of these...