I use a monthly panel of provincially-collected central government revenues and conflictfatalities to estimate government revenues lost due to conflict in Afghanistan since 2005. Iidentify causal effects by instrumenting for conflict using pre-sample ethno-linguistic share.Headline estimates are...

Structural reforms in the liquidity trap need not be deflationary. This paper develops a simple framework to study the role that key characteristics of Japan's labor and product markets-labor-market duality and weak corporate governance-play in generating unfavorable wage-price dynamics. The...

We estimate the effects on growth of nine fiscal reform episodes in seven high-income countries using the Synthetic Control Method. These episodes are selected using an indicator-based approach applied to the evaluation of growth-friendly fiscal reforms during 1975-2010. We find that in reform...

Paraguay faces a trade-off between building fiscal credibility and amending the existing fiscal rule to accommodate infrastructure investment and provide space for countercyclical policies. In this paper, we discuss several alternative fiscal rules for Paraguay and present simulations of debt...

Published in late 2017, the Italian medium-term fiscal plan aims to achieve structural balanceby 2020, although concrete, high-quality measures to meet the target are yet to be specified.This paper seeks to contribute to the discussion by (i) assessing spending patterns to identifyareas for...

This paper revisits options for fiscal anchors in Australia against the backdrop of a medium-term budget balance anchor that has led to larger than expected upward drift in the net debt to GDP ratio since the end of the mining investment boom. The IMF's G20MOD model is used to compare the budget...

This paper studies the impact on growth, welfare, and government debt of fiscal reform packages in a theoretical model drawing together three key features of the endogenous growth literature: (i) investment in technology (in the form of human capital) offsets diminishing marginal productivity of...

This paper assesses Japan’s fiscal stance in the past and the future with a stochastic structural model called the Buffer-Stock Model of the Government. Our retrospective analysis suggests that the fiscal stance in the 1990s and the early 2000s was overall looser than the model...

In recent decades, population has been aging fast in Brazil while old age pensions and health related spending have increased. As the population ages, the spending trend threaten to reach unsustainable levels absent reforms. Increasing the retirement age is key, but by itself will not provide...