Legal provisions that interfere with the arrest and prosecution of politicians exist throughout much of the modern democratic world. Why and with what effects do societies choose to place their politicians above the law? We examine the institution of immunity both theoretically and empirically....

In this paper we study the macroeconomic effects of large exchange rate appreciations. Using a sample of 128 countries from 1960-2008, we identify large nominal and real appreciations shocks and study their macroeconomic effects in a dummy-augmented panel autoregressive model. Our results show...

Legal provisions that protect politicians from arrest and prosecution exist throughout much of the modern democratic world. Why, and with what effects, do societies choose to place their politicians above the law? We examine the institution of immunity both theoretically and empirically. Our...

The pre-crisis paradigm focused exclusively on the positive role of finance. The new paradigm takes the other side of finance seriously and arrives at distinctly different trade-offs and regulatory approaches.

Business cycles are costlier and stabilization policies more beneficial than widely thought. This paper shows that all business cycles are asymmetric and resemble mini “disasters.” By this we mean that growth is pervasively fat-tailed and non-Gaussian. Using long-run historical data, we show...