The study will first outline the way in which Germany's fiscal policy was driven for several decades by a paradigm that centered on deficit control and reduced state involvement in the economy. It will assess the damage wrought by this strategy; for example, underinvestment in infrastructure and...

Whenever unemployment stays high for an extended period, it is common to see analyses, statements, and rebuttals about the extent to which the high unemployment is structural, not cyclical. This essay views the Beveridge curve pattern of unemployment and vacancy rates and the related matching...

Global poverty and poverty reduction are right now, more prominent public issues in high-income countries than they have ever have been, but progress toward the eradication of global poverty is at increasingly grave risk due to global macro-economic imbalances. At the heart of the problem is the...

After decades of neglect the HIV/AIDS epidemic has rightly become one of the highest priorities on the global agenda. Funding pledges from the donors have doubled resource commitments between 2002 and 2004 to over $6 billion. That surge in funding belies the volatile nature of contributions to...

Whether government spending can boost the pace of economic growth is widely debated. In the neoclassical growth model, it is supplies of productive resources and productivity that determine growth in the long-run. In endogenous growth models, an increase in government spending may raise the...

Most poor people in developing countries still live in rural areas and are primarily engaged in low productivity farming activities. Thus pathways out of poverty are likely to be strongly connected to productivity increases in the rural economy, whether they are realised in farming, rural...

The U.S. military has become substantially engaged in development and stabilization and will likely continue to carry out these activities in in-conflict zones for some time to come. Since FY2002, nearly $62 billion has been appropriated for relief and reconstruction in Afghanistan. A large...

We study the real effects of credit supply shocks during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. To this end, we merge administrative micro-level data on the universe of bank loans to firms with matched employer-employee social security records. For each firm, we measure its exposure to time-varying...

We propose a novel framework to gauge the credibility of central banks' commitment to an inflation-targeting regime. Our framework combines survey data on macroeconomic forecasts with high-frequency financial market data to understand how inflation targeting makes economic agents change their...

We study a large-scale quasi-experiment in the Brazilian banking sector characterized by an unexpected and macroeconomically relevant increase in lending by commercial government banks. Using credit registry data, we find that this intervention led to a reduction in lending rates, but it did not...