Using monthly zip-code level data on credit card transactions covering 16 U.S. cities, this paper investigates changes in consumption at local commercial places during the early coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) era. Since using aggregate-level data can suppress valuable information on...

We provide a descriptive analysis of various qualities of peer-reviewed journal publications of graduates of North American economics PhD programs between 1980 and 2014. We find that the share of single-author papers in all published papers diminishes from 60% in 1980 to 50% in 1990 and then...

Thresholds of inflation, government size, trade openness, and per capita income for the finance-growth nexus are investigated using five-year averages of standard variables for 84 countries from 1965 to 2004. The results suggest that (i) high inflation crowds out positive effects of financial...

The degree to which domestic prices adjust to exchange rate movements is key to understanding inflation dynamics, and hence to guiding monetary policy. However, the exchange rate pass-through to inflation varies considerably across countries and over time. By estimating structural...

This paper examines the drivers of fluctuations in global inflation, defined as a common factor across monthly headline consumer price index (CPI) inflation in G7 countries, over the past half-century. It estimates a Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression model where a wide range of shocks,...

This paper investigates the effects of real energy price shocks on the current account balances of 45 emerging market and developing economies using country-specific structural vector autoregression models. The empirical results suggest that a 1 percent increase in real oil prices results in up...

Many developing countries display remarkably high degrees of urban concentration that are incommensurate with their levels of urbanization. The cost of excessively high levels of urban concentration can be very high in terms of overpopulation, congestion, and productivity growth. One strand of...

This paper examines the global drivers of inflation in 55 countries over 1970-2022. The paper estimates a Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression model for each country and assess the importance of several global (demand, supply, and oil price) and domestic shocks. It reports three main results....