A growing body of work has shown that aggregate shocks affect the formation of preferences and beliefs. This article reviews evidence from sociology, social psychology, and economics to assess the relevance of aggregate shocks, whether the period in which they are experienced matters, and...

The share of e-commerce in total credit-card spending boomed during Covid in Spain. In particular, women, youth, and urban consumers used e-commerce proportionally more during the pandemic, especially for services. Using a unique proprietary dataset on credit card transactions, we test...

Which structural reforms affect the speed the regional convergence within a country? We found that domestic financial development, trade/current account openness, better institutional infrastructure, and selected labor market reforms facilitate regional convergence. However, these reforms have...

Do foreign-educated individuals play a role in promoting democracy in their home countries? Despite the large amount of private and public resources spent on foreign education, there is no systematic evidence that foreign-educated individuals foster democracy in their home countries. Using a...

This paper evaluates the performance of fiscal policy in Russia since the 1998 crisis along several dimensions, using a variety of indicators. Russia has progressed tremendously in recent years on public debt sustainability, largely thanks to the fact that the real interest rates on public debt...

After the large exchange rate depreciations following the 1997 East Asian crisis, export volumes from East Asian countries responded with a notable lag. Two main explanations for this lag have been proposed: that the policy of high interest rates limited access to domestic credit and hence...

In a large panel of countries, we find that less liquid countries are more likely to default on their external debt. Specifically, for given total external debt, the probability of a crisis increases with the proportion of short-term debt and debt service coming due and decreases with foreign...

The paper concludes that world copper prices play an important role in short-term fluctuations and probably influence long-term growth of the Chilean economy. While many mechanisms may be at work, investment seems to play a major role. In a copper price boom, the higher copper price and...

The real effective exchange rate is an aggregation of several bilateral real exchange rates with respect to other countries. The aggregation is usually done under the assumption of constant elasticity of substitution (CES) between products from different countries. We investigate the validity of...

We analyze how the pass-through from exchange rate to domestic wages depends on the degree of integration between domestic and foreign labor markets. Using data from 66 countries over the period 1981–2005, we find that the elasticity of domestic wages to real exchange rate is 0.1 after a...