President Joe Biden faces some political and economic headwinds in the upcoming U.S. midterm elections this year. Current economic challenges include historically high inflation rates and signs of an impending recession. [...] This paper gives a critical overview of the political and economic...

This volume represents some of the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Research Committee on Development Economics (Ausschuss für Entwicklungsländer) of the German Economic Association (Verein für Socialpolitik) held in Cologne, Germany, in July 2004. The meeting focused on the...

Ignoring for a moment the debate on whether balanced budget rules are a sensible idea from a macroeconomic point of view, there remains a major problem with tying one’s fi scal policy to econometric estimates of potential variables: their notorious unreliability. With every one of its biannual...

Four alternative but related approaches to empirical evaluation of policy interventions are studied: social experiments, natural experiments, matching methods, and instrumental variables. In each case the necessary assumptions and the data requirements are considered for estimation of a number...

This paper investigates how macroeconomic policy shocks in Turkey affect the total unemployment and provides evidence on the differential responses of the unemployment by sectors of economic activity. Our paper extends the previous work in two respects. First, we consider not only the response...

This paper describes the changes in economic policies and in macroeconomic conditions in the 1990s and analyses their impact on the agricultural sector in Brazil. We emphasize four aspects of the reform period that were either unexpected or not given sufficient attention by authors writing in...

Is the Chinese growth miracle - a remarkably high growth rate sustained for over two decades - likely to persist or are the seeds of its eventual demise contained in the policies that have boosted growth? For all its presumed flaws, the particular approach to macroeconomic and structural...

This paper investigates how macroeconomic policy shocks in Turkey affect the total unemployment and provides evidence on the differential responses of the unemployment by sectors of economic activity. Our paper extends the previous work in two respects. First, we consider not only the response...

This paper combines different strands of the productivity literature to investigate the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. On the one hand, a growing body of empirical research has been relating cross-country differences in key economic outcomes, such...