The volatility of U.S. real GDP growth since 1984 has been markedly lower than that over the previous quarter-century. In this paper, we utilize frequency-domain and VAR methods to distinguish among several competing explanations for this phenomenon: improvements in monetary policy, better...

Projections of sustained strong growth in India depend importantly on the utilization of the huge increase in India's working-age population projected over the next two decades. To date, however, India's economic growth has been concentrated in high-skill and capital-intensive sectors, and has...

This paper assesses China's role in Asia as an independent engine of growth, as a conduit of demand from the industrial countries, and as a competitor for export markets. We provide both macroeconomic and microeconomic evidence. The macroeconomic analysis focuses on the impact of U.S. and...

We study the role an illiquid durable consumption good plays in determining the level of precautionary savings and the distribution of wealth in a standard Aiyagari model (i.e. a model with heterogeneous agents, idiosyncratic uncertainty, and borrowing constraints). Transactions costs induce an...

Gali and Gertler (1999) are the first to find that the baseline sticky price model fits the U.S. data well. I examine the robustness of their estimates along two dimensions. First, I show that their IV estimates are not robust to an alternative normalization of the moment condition being...

We present a readily available monthly measure of the intensity of capital controls across 29 emerging market countries that is based on the degree of restrictions on foreign ownership of equities. The initial opening of a market as given by our measure corresponds well with the liberalization...

This paper reports monthly estimates of U.S. cross-border securities positions obtained by combining the (now) annual TIC surveys with monthly transactions data adjusted for various differences in the two reporting standards. Our approach is similar to that of Thomas, Warnock, and Wongswan...

We analyze how public debt evolves when successive policymakers have different policy goals and cannot make credible commitments about their future policies. We consider several cases to be able to disentangle and quantify the respective effects of imperfect commitment and political...