International Economic Review最新文献

We provide a New Keynesian model with overlapping generations to study the impact of temporary and permanent increases in fiscal deficits financed by debt rollover policy when interest rates are lower than economic growth rates. The debt rollover policy is feasible in the monetary regime but leads to very slow-moving debt. This policy generates persistent inflation for a temporary increase in fiscal deficits, but persistent disinflation for a permanent increase. For social welfare, the debt rollover policy dominates the conventional fiscal rule to finance a temporary increase in fiscal deficits, but it is dominated if the increase is permanent.

International migration is a selective process with ambiguous effects on human capital and economic development in sending countries. We establish the theoretical microfoundations of the relationship between selective emigration and human capital accumulation in a multicountry context. We embed this migration–education nexus into a development accounting framework to quantify the effects of migration on development and inequality. Selective emigration stimulates human capital accumulation and income in most origin countries. The effect varies according to the level of development, the dyadic structure of migration costs, and education policies. Emigration significantly reduces the number of people living in extreme poverty.

We use financial reforms as a case study to understand the temporal clustering of policy changes across countries, shedding light on the broader phenomenon of global policy contagion. We construct a comprehensive database of domestic financial reforms spanning 90 countries from 1973 to 2014. Using this dataset, we estimate a semistructural model that incorporates key factors identified in the literature. We find that (1) geopolitical influence and cross-country learning drove the global surge in reforms during the 1990s, and (2) reversals of financial reforms in developing countries after the global financial crisis reflected shifting beliefs about their growth effects.

We study contract design when the principal has limited information about the output distributions induced by the agent's actions. In a baseline model where only the means are known, we show that increasing affine contracts are robustly optimal. The mean restrictions accommodate a wide range of output distributions, including extreme cases that help establish this optimality. We then extend the analysis to environments with additional constraints on the distributions. Our main result shows that the robust optimality of increasing affine contracts persists even when the principal knows more—for example, that each action induces a distribution with full support.

We draw on a recombinant view of innovation, where being in a new location and/or multiple locations leads to exposure to novel combinations of ideas that increase the creativity of top scientists. Using a rich, unique data set we helped assemble, we estimate the empirical relationship between being in a new location and/or multiple locations and the expected interval before an eventual Nobel laureate (ENL) commences their prize-winning work. We find that being in a new location and in multiple locations are substantially and significantly associated with a shorter expected interval before ENLs commence their prize-winning work.