In the last two decades more than 120 countries have adopted a version of a Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF). These are budget institutions whose rationale it is to enable the central government to make credible multi-year fiscal commitments. This paper analyzes a newly-collected dataset...

This paper investigates the impact of institutional quality on public investment levels over the period 1984-2008. Moreover, it studies how the volatility of public investment and the quality of infrastructure are affected by institutional quality, and explores the contribution of other critical...

This paper investigates the determinants of primary school enrollment, attendance and child labor in Bolivia from 1999 to 2007. The analysis also aims at identifying the substitution and complementary relationships between schooling and working. Although enrollment rates show a significant...

This paper aims to identify the nexus between the excess of liquidity in the United States and commodity prices over the 1983-2006 period. In particular, it assesses whether commodity prices react more powerfully than consumer goods'prices to changes in real money balances. Within a cointegrated...

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...

"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...

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...

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 assesses whether the level of taxation of motor fuel is broadly appropriate in a group of countries (OECD, BRICs and South Africa) accounting for more than 80 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. The analysis deals with emissions from oil combustion in transport, which account...

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....