The global crisis highlights the continued vulnerability of developing countries to shocks from advanced economies. Just a few years after the global crisis, the eurozone sovereign debt crisis has emerged as the single biggest threat to the global outlook. In this paper, we apply the event study...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a new negotiation on cross border liberalization of goods and service flows going beyond WTO disciplines and focused on issues such as regulation and border controls. Though the US, Australia and other pacific countries are included, China is notable for...

Prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) is the single most effective HIV prevention intervention in practice today. Nonetheless, little reliable empirical evidence exists on the behavioral effects of PMTCT. This paper documents the rapid expansion of access to PMTCT in Zambia...

Motivated by the recent experience of the U.S. and the Eurozone, we describe the quantitative properties of a New Keynesian model with a zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates, explicitly accounting for the nonlinearities that the bound brings. Besides showing how such a model can be...

We report a puzzling pair of facts concerning the organization of science. The concentration of research output is declining at the department level but increasing at the individual level. For example, in evolutionary biology, over the period 1980 to 2000, the fraction of citation-weighted...

This paper examines the implicit health insurance households receive from the ability to declare bankruptcy. Exploiting cross-state and within-state variation in asset exemption law, I show that uninsured households with greater seizable assets make higher out-of-pocket medical payments,...

We study the wealth accumulation of Indian parliamentarians using public disclosures required of all candidates since 2003. Annual asset growth of winners is on average 3 to 6 percentage points higher than runners-up. By performing a within-constituency comparison where both runner-up and winner...

Will fast growing emerging economies sustain rapid growth rates until they "catch-up" to the technology frontier? Are there incentives for some developed countries to free-ride off of innovators and optimally "fallback" relative to the frontier? This paper models agents growing as a result of...

We examine the dynamic macroeconomic effects of public infrastructure investment both theoretically and empirically, using a novel data set we compiled on various highway spending measures. Relying on the institutional design of federal grant distributions among states, we construct a measure of...

We study how economic incentives affect labor force exit through different income security programs, old-age pensions as well as income taxes in Sweden. We use the option value for staying in the labor force as a measure of economic incentives and estimate an econometric model for the choice of...