Natural disasters are an important source of vulnerability in the Caribbean region. Despite being one of the more disaster-prone areas of the world, it has the lowest levels of insurance coverage. This paper examines the vulnerability of Belize's public finance to the occurrence of hurricanes...

Financial stability is an important policy objective since crises are associated with big economic, social, and political costs. Promoting stability requires preventing 'sudden stops' in capital flows, which are events in which foreign financing abruptly disappears. This paper contributes to the...

Although financial development is good for long-term growth, not all countries pursue policies that render full financial development. This paper builds on an extensive political economy literature to construct a theoretical model showing that the intensity of opposition to financial development...

This paper estimates the impact of relative price volatility on sector-level investment allocation using a panel of 65 countries with data for 26 manufacturing industries over the period 1985-2003. Results indicate that volatility distorts efficient investment allocation in that investment is...

This paper uses simple regression techniques to make an initial assessment of the monetary damages caused by the January 12, 2010 earthquake that struck Haiti. Damages are estimated for a disaster with both 200,000 and 250,000 total dead and missing (i.e., the range of mortality that the...

Catastrophes caused by natural disasters are by no means new, yet the evolving understanding of their relevance to economic development and growth is still in its infancy. In order to facilitate further necessary research on this topic, this paper summarizes the state of the economic literature...

This paper examines the short and long-run average causal impact of catastrophic natural disasters on economic growth by combining information from comparative case studies. The counterfactual of the cases studied is assessed by constructing synthetic control groups, taking advantage of the fact...

This study explores the relationship between demographic factors and saving rates using a panel dataset covering 110 countries between 1963 and 2012. In line with predictions from theory, this paper finds that lower dependency rates and greater longevity increase domestic saving rates. However,...

A surprisingly large number of countries have been able to finance a significant fraction of domestic investment using foreign finance for extended periods. While many of these episodes are in low-income countries where official finance is more important than private finance, this paper also...