This paper provides evidence on the effect of fiscal stimulus on economic activity in countries with different degrees of institutional quality. The identification strategy makes use of data on military expenditure to instrument government consumption using local lineal projections as presented...

Fiscal policy and net capital inflows in developing countries are procyclical. A large amount of literature has examined this phenomenon and explored its consequences for aggregate fluctuations. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) are an important source of external finance for governments and...

After adopting an inflation targeting framework for monetary policy at the turn of the twenty-first century, Banco de la República, the Central Bank of Colombia, started actively using the monetary policy interest rate as its key policy tool. This paper examines the interest rate pass-through...

Using a large panel of official bilateral loan data for 111 borrowing countries and 78 lending countries between 1980 and 2020, this paper shows that international government borrowing from bilateral sources is acyclical with respect to the economic cycle of the borrower, but procyclical with...

The pandemic hit the Colombian economy as hard as other countries. Using a novel Business Pulse Survey, this paper tests the effect of government support and COVID-19 cases on firms' performance. A one-standard-deviation increase in government support (in periods in which the pandemic's...

We explore how Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) can help to fill a large infrastructure financing gap in developing countries by indirectly mobilizing resources from other entities. The analysis focuses on more than 6,500 transactions in 2005-2020 to developing and emerging markets from the...

A considerable literature has focused on the determinants of total factor productivity (TFP), prompted by the empirical finding that TFP accounts for the bulk of long-term growth. This paper offers a deeper reason for such focus: the welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by current...

This paper shows that the welfare of a country's representative consumer can be measured using just two variables: current and future total factor productivity and the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare differences...

The main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical overview of the recent empirical contributions that use cross-country data to study the effects of product market regulation and reform on a country's macroeconomic performance. After a brief review of the theoretical literature and of...