Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address...

This paper presents a rational political budget cycle model for an open economy, in which devaluations are delayed in the pre-election period so as to increase the electoral chances of the party in office. By concentrating on closed economies, previous political cycle models had overlooked the...

This paper presents a rational political budget cycle model for an open economy, in which devaluations are delayed in the pre-election period so as to increase the electoral chances of the party in office. By concentrating on closed economies, previous political cycle models had overlooked the...

In this paper, we use a panel approach to study population growth in primate cities around the world. We find that primate cities grow faster in relatively backward economies, and in more volatile and faster growing economies. We also find that the effects of trade policy on the growth of...

This paper tests whether Rodrik's (1999) results that institutions for conflict management are associated with the ability to react to economic shocks are robust to different ways of defining the quality of such institutions. We measure the quality of conflict management institutions with two...