The year 2016 appears to be one of the toughest for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as their governments face serious policy challenges. The biggest challenge for oil exporters is managing their finances and diversification strategies with oil below $45 a barrel. Fiscal...

This paper proposes a new decomposition method to understand how gender pay gaps arise within firms. The method accounts for pipeline effects, nonstationary environments, and dynamic interactions between pay gap components. This paper assembles a new data set covering all employees at the World...

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of individuals' and couples' labor supply, savings, and retirement decisions to analyze how the design of a privatized pension system affects gender pension gaps. Chile has one of the longest running nationwide private retirements accounts...

Transnational terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State group (also known as ISIS/ISIL or Daesh) have shown an ability to attract radicalized individuals from many countries to join their ranks. Using a novel data set that reports countries of residence and educational levels of a large...

Low- and middle-income countries are aging rapidly but stagnation of growth in participation in pension programs, due to widespread informal employment, presents a major fiscal challenge. Some claim that improving the design of pension program rules can encourage more pension contributions,...

In this paper, we build a new test of rational expectations based on the marginal distributions of realizations and subjective beliefs. This test is widely applicable, including in the common situation where realizations and beliefs are observed in two different data sets that cannot be matched....