During the medieval and early modern periods the Middle East lost its economic advantage relative to the West. Recent explanations of this historical phenomenon—called the Long Divergence—focus on these regions’ distinct political economy choices regarding religious legitimacy and limited governance. We study these features in a political economy model of the interactions between rulers, secular and clerical elites, and civil society. The model induces a joint evolution of culture and political institutions converging to one of two distinct stationary states: a religious and a secular regime. We then map qualitatively parameters and initial conditions characterizing the West and the Middle East into the implied model dynamics to show that they are consistent with the Long Divergence as well as with several key stylized political and economic facts. Most notably, this mapping suggests non-monotonic political economy dynamics in both regions, in terms of legitimacy and limited governance, which indeed characterize their history.

Small open economies are known to be impacted by shocks to larger economies. This phenomenon is known as macroeconomic vulnerability. We propose and implement a novel index of macroeconomic vulnerability to foreign shocks for a given pair of a large economy and a small open economy. It uses a structural time-varying Bayesian VAR with a block-exogeneity hypothesis. The index is based on the sum of the responses of the small open economy to shocks in the large economy over time, thus allowing us to disentangle and measure the source of the shock, the impact variables, and the duration of impact. We highlight two results out of the many that our index unveils. First, we do not find a difference between the international impact of U.S. shocks during periods of crises versus stability. Second, we find that there is a growing decouple between emerging markets (EM) and developed markets (DM) on how their domestic inflation is affected by U.S. output shocks. Our approach can also be used to elucidate previously unknown transmission channels or unmeasured theoretical mechanisms. Finally, using a sample of developed and developing countries, we find that global banks do not increase the macroeconomic vulnerability of a country.

This paper analyzes how changes in the concentration of political power affect long-run development. We study Brazil’s military dictatorship whose rise to power dramatically altered the distribution of power of local political elites. We document that municipalities that were more politically concentrated prior to the dictatorship in the 1960s are relatively richer in 2000, despite being poorer initially. Our evidence suggests that this reversal of fortune was the result of the military’s policies aimed at undermining the power of traditional elites. These policies increased political competition among traditional elites, leading to better governance, more public goods, and higher income levels

We provide an abstract model of the interaction between culture and political institutions. The model is designed to study the political economy of elites and civil society on the determination of long-run socioeconomic activity. We characterize conditions such that the cultural traits of elites and civil society and the institutions determining their relative political power complement (substitute) each other, giving rise to a multiplier effect that amplifies (dampens) their combined ability to spur socioeconomic activity. We show how the joint dynamics may display hysteresis and oscillations, depending on the form of the interaction between elites and civil society.

The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggretion of the CPI over 1990-2021, and compares the properties of this measure to those of standard core. For quarterly data, we find that the weighted median is less volatile than standard core, more closely related to economic slack, and more closely related to headline inflation over the next year. The weighted median also has a drawback: in most countries, it has a lower average level than headline inflation. We therefore also consider a measure of core inflation that eliminates this bias, which is based on the percentile of sectoral inflation rates that matches the sample average of headline CPI inflation.

Inflation expectations can quickly become unanchored if the central bank undermines its commitment to the inflation target. This paper exploits a sudden change in monetary policy by the Brazilian Central Bank in 2011 and microdata from a daily survey of professional forecasters to establish support for this claim. Reanchoring came only years later, after a regime shift that included a change of government. A simple model with a well-defined concept of (un)anchored inflation expectations makes sense of and offers a structural interpretation of our empirical findings.

We propose a model that reconciles microeconomic evidence of frequent and large price changes with sizable monetary non-neutrality. Firms incur separate lump-sum costs to change prices and to gather and process some information about marginal costs. Additional relevant information is continuously available, and can be factored into pricing decisions at no cost. We estimate the model by Simulated Method of Moments, using price-setting statistics for the U.S. economy. The model with free idiosyncratic and costly aggregate information fits well both targeted and untargeted microeconomic moments and generates more than twice as much monetary non-neutrality as the Calvo model.

The Amazon rainforests have been undergoing unprecedented levels of human-induced

disturbances. In addition to local impacts, such changes are likely to cascade following

the eastern–western atmospheric flow generated by trade winds. We propose a model of

spatial and temporal interactions created by this flow to estimate the spread of effects

from local disturbances to downwind locations along atmospheric trajectories. The

spatial component captures cascading effects propagated by neighboring regions, while

the temporal component captures the persistence of local disturbances. Importantly, all

these network effects can be described by a single matrix, acting as a spatial multiplier

that amplifies local forest disturbances. This matrix holds practical implications for

policymakers as they can use it to easily map where the damage of an initial forest

disturbance is amplified and propagated to. We identify regions that are likely to cause

the largest impact throughout the basin and those that are the most vulnerable to shocks

caused by remote deforestation. On average, the presence of cascading effects mediated

by winds in the Amazon doubles the impact of an initial damage. However, there is

heterogeneity in this impact. While damage in some regions does not propagate, in

others, amplification can reach 250%. Since we only account for spillovers mediated

by winds, our multiplier of 2 should be seen as a lower bound

We augment a standard dynamic general equilibrium model with financial frictions, in order to quantify the macroeconomic effects of the credit deepening process observed in Latin America in the 2000s—most notably in Brazil. In the model, a stylized banking sector intermediates credit from patient households to impatient households and entrepreneurs. Motivated by the Brazilian experience, we allow the credit constraint faced by households to depend on labor income. Our model is designed to isolate the effects of credit deepening through demand-side channels, and abstracts from potential effects of credit supply on total factor productivity. In the calibrated model, credit deepening generates only modest above-trend growth in consumption, investment, and GDP. Since Brazil has experienced one of the most intense credit deepening processes in Latin America, we argue the quantitative effects that hinge on the channels captured by the model are unlikely to be sizable elsewhere in Latin America.

This paper elucidates the willingness of an autocrat to push through institutional reforms in a context where traditional authorities represented by religious clerics are averse to them and where the military control the means of repression and can potentially stage a coup. We show that although the autocrat always wants to co-opt the military, this is not necessarily true of the clerics. Exclusive co-option of the military obtains where the loyalty of the autocrat’s army is strong while the organizational strength of religious movements is rather low. Radical institutional reforms can then be implemented. Empirically, the dominant regime in contemporary Muslim countries is the regime of double co-option where the autocrat resorts to a double-edged tactic: pleasing the official clerics by slowing the pace of reforms and ensuring the loyalty of the military so as to put down clerics-led rebellions.

This paper provides a simple model of identity salience that is applied to the phenomenon of the recent rise in right-wing populism in the Western world. Trade and capital flows, skill-biased technological change, and migration have led to declining employment and wages in these economies and a parallel rise in economic and cultural populism, tapping into nativist sentiments. We argue that when long-term income stagnation for most of the population and decline for some go together with high rates of income growth at the very top, one has zero-sum economics and that naturally raises the possibility of using various kinds of social identities to claim a bigger share of a fixed sized pie. We show that in ethnically or racially polarized societies this naturally leads to the salience of social identities that enable majority ethnic groups to vote for policies that exclude minority groups so that they get a greater share of a dwindling surplus. In contrast, in more ethnically and racially homogeneous societies, this would instead lead to the demand for more pro-redistribution policies that involve greater provision of public goods.

This paper sets out a data-driven approach for targeting environmental policies optimally in order to combat deforestation. We focus on the Amazon, the world's most extensive rainforest, where Brazil's federal government issued a `Priority List' of municipalities in 2008 { a blacklist to be targeted with more intense environmental monitoring and enforcement. First, we estimate the causal impact of the Priority List on deforestation (along with other relevant treatment effects) using `changes-in-changes' (Athey and Imbens, 2006), finding that it reduced deforestation by 43 percent and cut emissions by 49 million tons of carbon. Second, we develop a novel framework for computing targeted optimal blacklists that draws on our treatment effect estimates, assigning municipalities to a counterfactual list that minimizes total deforestation subject to realistic resource constraints. We show that the ex-post optimal list would result in carbon emissions

We provide a new theory for nodewise regression when the residuals from a fitted factor model are used. We apply our results to the analysis of the consistency of Sharpe Ratio estimators when there are many assets in a portfolio. We allow for an increasing number of assets as well as time observations of the portfolio. Since the nodewise regression is not feasible due to the unknown nature of idiosyncratic errors, we provide a feasible-residual-based nodewise regression to estimate the precision matrix of errors which is consistent even when number of assets, p, exceeds the time span of the portfolio, n. In another new development, we also show that the precision matrix of returns can be estimated consistently, even with an increasing number of factors andp>n. We show that: (1) withp>n, the Sharpe Ratio estimators are consistent in global minimum-variance and mean–variance portfolios; and (2) withp>n, the maximum Sharpe Ratio estimator is consistent when the portfolio weights sum to one; and (3) withp<

We review two previous bouts of high inflation and disinflation since Brazil adopted inflation targeting. In both episodes, fiscal sustainability concerns were present and inflation expectations became unanchored despite substantial monetary policy tightening. Disinflation and the reanchoring of expectations took time and proved costly, as both episodes entailed a recession. They required tight monetary policy combined with critical shifts toward structural economic reforms and sound fiscal policy. The ongoing episode features the same fiscal concerns and unanchored inflation expectations. This suggests the path ahead for disinflation will be challenging, unless policies change direction. We also speculate whether the Brazilian experience can provide insights for other countries. 

European macroeconomic and financial aggregates move in lockstep over the business cycle. We develop a model in which a single risk premium shock triggers these comovements. The key feature is a financial sector where traditional banks transfer part of their risky loan portfolio to nonbank institutions. We fit the model to euro area data and find that risk premium shocks are the main driver of business and financial cycles over the past two decades.

We study a unique dataset with comprehensive coverage of daily prices in large multiproduct retailers in Israel. Retail stores synchronize price changes around occasional “peak” days when they reprice around 10% of their products. To assess aggregate implications of partial price synchronization, we develop a new model in which multiproduct firms face economies of scope in price adjustment, and synchronization is endogenous. Synchronization of price changes attenuates the average price response to monetary shocks, but only high degrees of synchronization can substantially strengthen the real effects of monetary policy shocks. Our calibrated model generates real effects similar in magnitude to those in Golosov and Lucas (2007).

We study the implications of transparency policies on decentralised public good provision by the non-profit sector. We present a model where imperfect monitoring of the use of funds interacts with the competitive structure of the non-profit sector under alternative informational regimes. Increasing transparency regarding the use of funds may have ambiguous effects on total public good provision and on donors’ welfare. On the one hand, transparency encourages all non-profit firms to engage more actively in curbing fund diversion. On the other hand, it tilts the playing field against non-profits facing higher monitoring costs, pressing them to give up on their missions. This effect on the extensive margin implies that transparency policies lead to a reduction in the diversity of social missions addressed by the non-profit sector. We show that the negative impact of transparency on social mission variety and on donors’ welfare is highest for intermediate levels of asymmetry in monitoring costs.

This paper proposes a novel instrumental variable to estimate the causal impact of law enforcement on deforestation. DETER, a satellite-based system for mapping land cover, is the key tool in Amazon monitoring. It determines the location of recent forest clearings and is used to target enforcement. Because DETER cannot detect land cover patterns beneath clouds, it detects no clearings in covered areas. Results conrm that DETER cloud coverage is systematically correlated with nes, a proxy for the presence of law enforcers. The study explores this exogenous source of variation in the allocation of law enforcers as an instrument for the intensity of enforcement. Stricter law enforcement eectively deterred Amazon deforestation, helping avoid over 22,000 km2 of cleared forest area per sample year. Leakage of criminal activity into neighboring areas does not appear to have occurred. Results are submitted to a series of robustness checks.

We propose a model of intergenerational transmission of education wherein children belong to either highly educated or low-educated families. Children choose the intensity of their social activities, while parents decide how much educational effort to exert. Using Add Health data, we find that, on average, children’s homophily acts as a complement to the educational effort of highly educated parents but as a substitute for the educational effort of low-educated parents. We also find that policies that subsidize kids’ socialization efforts can backfire for low-educated students because they tend to increase their interactions with other low-educated students.