Rising public debt everywhere has raised the question of how to reduce debt again in the future. High public debt also seems to be an impediment for the exit of central banks from ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing. Historical precedents and proposals have included austerity,...

Research on the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor - ó - has been proceeding for 75 years. While there is clearly a strong case for the importance of ó in the analysis of growth and other economic issues, much less agreement exists on the value of ó. This paper offers some...

This paper evaluates the predictive content of a set of alternative monthly indicators of global economic activity for nowcasting and forecasting quarterly world GDP using mixed-frequency models. We find that a recently proposed indicator that covers multiple dimensions of the global economy...

This paper investigates the key factors affecting household energy expenditure in Egypt. Based upon the latest 2015 Egyptian HIECS Survey, we develop a quantile regression model with an innovative variable selection approach via Adaptive Lasso Regularization technique to untangle the spectrum of...

This paper examines the statistical properties of energy consumption in the GCC countries applying fractional integration methods to annual data from 1980 to 2014. The results indicate that both the raw and the logged series exhibit a (statistically significant) linear time trend in the case of...

We provide evidence of an energy efficiency gap in China. Using an incentivized field experiment, we document that providing information to consumers on the energy costs of lightbulbs significantly affects their willingness to pay for energy efficient bulbs. Unlike previous literature, we do not...

IMF programs are often considered to carry a “stigma” that triggers adverse market reactions. We show that such a negative IMF effect disappears when accounting for endogenous selection into programs. To proxy for a country's access to financial markets, we use credit ratings and investor...

This paper first searches for the drivers of the Greek depression in the aftermath of the 2007-8 global crisis and in turn looks for engines of sustained growth. We use a micro-founded macroeconomic model calibrated to Greece. Our simulations show that the adopted adjustment program (namely, the...

This paper focuses on the debt recovery channel linking the dynamics of public debt to partial sovereign defaults. We build a simple model which incorporates sovereign default and a debt recovery rule. It depends on a parameter that allows for partial debt recovery. We show that the maximum...

The loans of the IMF, World Bank, and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) are excluded from debt restructuring. This is the result of their preferred creditor status. There are two justifications for the preferred creditor status of MDBs: (a) they give concessional loans, and (b) they...