High oil prices and politics periodically elicit calls for more U.S. oil exploration in ecologically sensitive areas, in particular, Alaska's ANWR coastal plain with its large reserves. Though ANWR survived untouched from the elections and high prices in 2008, President Obama's recent proposal...

Juxtaposing qualitative as well as quantitative facts across the broader African continent, the authors explore critical issues compounding developmental woes of the continent at the present. Despite the facts being on the fringes as explanations to the sluggish development of Africa, the...

This paper analyzes the relationship between functional income distribution aggregate demand and economic growth in five Central American countries; Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama for the period 1970-2016. It estimates the effects of a change in the wage share on...

This paper reviews the main issues related to the short-term impact of structural reforms in different macroeconomic contexts and takes stock of existing theoretical and empirical studies. Taking reforms introduced in “normal” times as a benchmark, it reviews the available evidence on the...

Due to the large proportion of emissions which the transportation sector accounts for and the comparative ease with which emissions from this sector can be managed, key countries are tightening emissions regulations in the transportation sector. To this end, various proclamations have been made...

This note shows in what circumstances output persistence may invert the pattern of the electoral cycle when inflation expectations are of the adaptive or rational type and the government preferences are quadratic over output and inflation.

This is the supplemental material to the paper titled "Distinguishing Constraints on Financial Inclusion and Their Impact on GDP, TFP, and The Distribution of Income." It includes additional theoretical and quantitative results. It also includes illustration for the numerical algorithm for our...

A general equilibrium model featuring multiple realistic sources of financial frictions is developed to study how different constraints interact in equilibrium. We highlight, distinguish, and evaluate their differential impacts and rich interactions. The economic impact of financial inclusion...

The increasing dominance of finance starting in the late 1970s/early 1980s in the US and the UK, and somewhat later in other countries, was associated with two fundamental and structural processes generating the contradictions of this phase of development and finally the financial and economic...

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, those East European countries that had partly privatized their pension systems in the 1990s or early 2000s increasingly scaled back their mandatory private retirement accounts and restored the role of public provision. What explains this wave of reversals...