Bulgaria is in the midst of a serious demographic transition that will shrink its population at one of the highest rates in the world within the next few decades. This study analyzes the macroeconomic and fiscal implications of this demographic transition by using a long-term model, which...

The role of inherited wealth in modern economies has increasingly come under scrutiny. This study presents one of the first attempts to shed light on how demographic aging could shape this role. It shows that, in the absence of retirement annuities, or for a given level of annuitization, both...

This paper analyzes the impact of aging on capital accumulation and welfare in a country with a sizable unfunded social security system. Using a two-period overlapping generation model with endogenous retirement decisions, the paper shows that the type of aging and the type of unfunded social...

Assuming a given educational policy, the recent brain drain literature reveals that skilled migration can boost the average level of schooling in developing countries. This paper introduces educational subsidies determined by governments concerned by the number of skilled workers remaining in...

The authors present a measure of jointness to explore dependence among regressors in the context of Bayesian model selection. The jointness measure they propose equals the posterior odds ratio between those models that include a set of variables and the models that only include proper subsets....

"Getting the prices right" is a good starting point but is not sufficient for achieving environmentally efficient outcomes. Other policy interventions are often necessary to complement pricing policies. Moreover, when pricing is not at all feasible, regulatory and command-and-control policies...

This paper considers the effects of inaccurate real-time output data on fiscal management, both with respect to budgetary planning and fiscal surveillance. As newer and better information becomes available, output data available in real time get revised and are likely to conflict with final...

This paper relaxes some key assumptions in the probabilistic approach to fiscal sustainability. First, the authors identify structural breaks over the sample period used to estimate the covariance matrix of the shocks to the debt ratios. Second, the assumption of normality of the shocks is...

This paper examines the problem of variable selection in linear regression models. Bayesian model averaging has become an important tool in empirical settings with large numbers of potential regressors and relatively limited numbers of observations. The paper analyzes the effect of a variety of...

This paper investigates how the devolution of oil windfalls affects the likelihood of political violence. It shows that transferring large shares of oil wealth can prevent conflict, while transferring small shares can trigger it. Among the different transfer schemes, fiscal transfers (to...