Little is known about the impact of interventions aimed at reducing the demand for singleuse plastic bags. In a natural field experiment conducted in a big supermarket chain in Armenia, we test how a nudge (information on the environmental impact of plastic), a competitive financial bonus...

A growing body of post-global financial crisis (2007-2008) literature documents several undesirable effects of enlarged financial sectors. One of these effects is the 'growth cost' of excessive finance, which reports that the finance-growth relationship is non-monotonic, and that a credit...

This paper explores the economic impacts of the Bank of England's quantitative easing policy, implemented as a response to the global financial crisis. Using an open economy Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model, we demonstrate that monetary policy can remain effective even when...

In a recent article Pfleiderer (2020) argues that models should be put through a 'reality filter' before they should be taken seriously as a basis for empirical testing or policy analysis. He regards models that make dubious assumptions as 'chameleons', because while as theory they may give...

We develop an endogenous growth model with public consumption and infrastructure services provided by two-tier governments. Growth performance and welfare implication are compared under the centralized and decentralized fiscal federal systems. In general, there is a trade-off between welfare and...

China's fast growth has been accompanied by rising regional inequality, triggering debate over a policy trade-off between aggregate growth and equity. We set out a three-region model of China in which local government behavior affects local TFP dynamics, and regional inequality itself generates...

Developed economies have experienced slower growth since the 2008 Önancial crisis, creating fears of "secular stagnation." Rational expectations models have forward-looking bubble solutions, which could cause this; here we investigate the case of Japan. We show that a New Keynesian model with a...

Facing the sanctions from the West since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia quickly converged to a strong counter-sanction strategy. The US and the EU staggered the strengths of sanctions in turns, with the EU first imposing relatively stronger commercial sanctions first and the US...

The purpose of this shorter paper is to estimate the trend of 18 th century British slave prices. We apply robust econometric procedures on slave price data constructed by Whatley (2018) over the period 1699 to 1807 and find evidence of a structural break in 1740, thereby advocating a broken...