Road infrastructure has been a key input in the economic growth and poverty reduction strategies of China and India. The two countries have used very different instruments for road financing with China mobilizing substantial resources through directed credit by state-owned banks and India...

We develop a New Keynesian (NK) model with endogenous price setting frequency. Whether a firm updates its price in a given period depends on an analysis of expected cost and benefits modelled by a discrete choice process. A firm decides to update the price when expected benefits outweigh...

In this work, we assess the global impact of COVID-19 showing how demographic factors, testing policies and herd immunity are key for saving lives. We extend a standard epidemiological SEIR model in order to: (a) identify the role of demographics (population size and population age distribution)...

Eligibility and benefits for anti-poverty income transfers in the U.S. are based on both the means and the household characteristics of applicants, such as their filing status, living arrangement, and marital status. In this paper we develop a dynamic structural model to study the effects of the...

We employ a novel approach for analyzing the effects of relative consumption and relative wealth preferences on both the decentralized and the socially optimal economic growth rates. In the pertinent literature these effects are usually assessed by examining the dependence of the growth rates on...

We assess the long-run growth effects of automation in the overlapping generations framework. Although automation implies constant returns to capital and, thus, an AK production side of the economy, positive long-run growth does not emerge. The reason is that automation suppresses wage income,...

We estimate state-dependent government spending multipliers for the United States. We use a Factor-Augmented Interacted Vector Autoregression (FAIVAR) model. This allows us to capture the time-varying monetary policy characteristics including the recent zero interest rate lower bound (ZLB)...

As the heterogeneity in life expectancy by socioeconomic status increases, pension systemsbecome more regressive implying wealth transfers from short to long lived individuals. Variouspension reforms aim to reduce these inequalities that are caused by ex-ante differences in lifeexpectancy....

This paper develops a theory of endogenously (non-)Ricardian beliefs. That is, whether Ricardian Equivalence holds in an equilibrium depends on endogenous private sector beliefs. The novelty here is a restricted perceptions viewpoint: in complex forecasting environments, agents forecast...

When the principal decisions for the European Monetary Union (EMU) were made it was acknowledged that it would not be an optimal currency area (OCA). Potential trouble was assumed away as asymmetric shocks were expected to fade, while rising productivity enhanced the resilience of EMU member...