Global financial regulators are currently reflecting on the nature of the insurance business. Specifically, they are trying to classify insurance into "traditional" and "non-traditional" activities, and to distinguish them from "non-insurance" activities. Subsequently, they will seek to apply...

This paper estimates the causal effect of fiscal rules on fiscal balances in a panel of 142 countries over the period 1985-2015. Our instrumental variable strategy exploits the geographical diffusion of fiscal rules across countries. The intuition is that reforms in neighboring countries may...

Extending previous work on the determinants of IMF lending in an interconnected world, we introduce a model of sample selection in which both selection and size dimensions of individual IMF arrangements are presented within a unified econometric framework. We allow for unobserved heterogeneity...

Empirical (employing the Blanchard-Perotti framework) and modeling (using a country-specific DSGE model) approaches are used to estimate fiscal multipliers by policy instrument for Bolivia, to evaluate possible adjustments in a fiscal consolidation strategy. Multipliers are also estimated using...