The empirical relationship between the average growth rate and the volatility of growth rates, both over time and across countries, has important policy implications, which depend critically on the sign of the relationship. Following Ramey and Ramey (1995), a wide consensus has been building...

There is a growing literature that studies the properties of models that combine international trade and neoclassical growth theory, but mostly in a deterministic setting. In this paper we introduce uncertainty in a dynamic Heckscher-Ohlin model and characterize the equilibrium of a small open...

There is a growing literature that studies the properties of models that combine international trade and neoclassical growth theory, but mostly in a deterministic setting. In this paper we introduce uncertainty in a dynamic Heckscher–Ohlin model and characterize the equilibrium of a small open...

We study the volatility of growth rates and find that it differs systematically across countries. Our empirical investigation reveals that there is a high correlation between disparity in political regimes across countries and differences in volatility. This is not the case for some of the...

In the context of the classical stochastic growth model, we provide a simple proof that the optimal capital sequence is strictly bounded away from zero whenever the initial capital is strictly positive. We assume that the utility function is bounded below and the shocks affecting output are...

Our empirical investigation reveals that less democratic countries have higher volatility of GDP growth rates. Disparity in polity across countries robustly dominates differences in initial income, inequality or instability of regimes, the commonly cited reasons in the literature, as the main...

We study the volatility of growth rates and find that it differs systematically across countries. Our empirical investigation reveals that there is a high correlation between disparity in political regimes across countries and differences in volatility. This is not the case for some of the...

There is a growing literature that studies the properties of models that combine international trade and neoclassical growth theory, but mostly in a de- terministic setting. In this paper we introduce uncertainty in a dynamic Heckscher-Ohlin model and characterize the equilibrium of a small open...

This paper measures the welfare gains of switching from inflation-targeting to price-level targeting under imperfect credibility. Vestin (2006) shows that when the monetary authority cannot commit to future policy, price-level targeting yields higher welfare than inflation targeting. We revisit...

This paper examines the role of monetary policy in an environment with aggregate risk and incomplete markets. In a two-period overlapping-generations model with aggregate uncertainty and nominal bonds, optimal monetary policy attains the ex-ante Pareto optimal allocation. This policy aims to...