Public opinion in Europe seems worried about the effect of lower-wage country competition. In both newspaper articles and in policy debates, the term "social dumping" is becoming more and more popular. In many countries, trade unions worried by the effect of what they call "unfair competition,"...

This paper presents a model of bank risk taking and government guarantees. Levered banks take excessive risk, as their actions are not fully priced at the margin by debt holders. The impact of government guarantees on bank risk taking depends critically on the portion of bank investors that can...

This paper investigates how the devolution of oil windfalls affects the likelihood of political violence. It shows that transferring large shares of oil wealth can prevent conflict, while transferring small shares can trigger it. Among the different transfer schemes, fiscal transfers (to...

Monitoring technologies and pay for performance contracts are becoming popular solutions to improve public services delivery. Their track record is however mixed. To show why this may be the case, this paper develops a principal agent model where agents' motivations vary and so does the...

This paper looks at the correlation between the cyclical components of gross domestic product and the exchange rate and classifies countries' currencies as procyclical if they appreciate in good times, countercyclical if they appreciate in bad times, and acyclical otherwise. With this...

The control of bribery is a policy objective in many developing countries. It has been argued that asymmetric punishments could reduce bribery by incentivizing whistle-blowing. This paper investigates the role played by asymmetric punishment in a setting where bribe size is determined by Nash...

This paper computes a new financial globalization index for a large sample of countries for 1992-2016. Unlike other measures, the financial globalization index corrects for the heteroscedasticity of global volatility. This leads to a downward adjustment of financial globalization trends for...

Is generalized debt relief an effective development strategy, or should assistance be tailored to countries' characteristics? To answer this question, the authors build a simple model in which recipient governments reveal their creditworthiness if donors offer them to choose between aid and debt...

The standard macro(prudential) models focus on externalities and treat all prudential instruments as alternative, but equivalent, forms of Pigouvian taxes. This paper explicitly models individual banks' risk choices and shows that different prudential instruments affect banks' risk-taking...