infonet-economy

Profit and its investment in productive activities lie at the heart of modern monetary economies. Indeed, it is thanks to profit investment that fixed capital is produced and used by companies to increase the number of consumption goods and, ultimately, to increase the wealth of households. Yet, despite economists’ full understanding of corporate gains from a microeconomic...

Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address these drawbacks, we examine the impact of default on growth by looking at quarterly data...

A surprisingly large number of countries have been able to finance a significant fraction of domestic investment using foreign finance for extended periods. While many of these episodes are in low-income countries where official finance is more important than private finance, this paper also identifies a number of episodes where a substantial fraction of domestic investment was...

Recent attempts to connect the current ‘next billion’ to the Internet in places such as sub-Saharan Africa have not met expectations. In places where Internet infrastructure has come online and prices have gone down, the expected consequent increase in uptake was not observed. I develop a framework that incorporates language in the the two-sided markets framework, viewing differences...

What were the economic benefits and costs of preventing a stock market meltdown during the summer of 2015 by the Chinese government intervention? We answer this question by estimating the value creation for the stocks purchased by the government between the period starting with the market crash in mid-June and the market recovery in September. We find that the government intervention...

We extend the celebrated Rothschild and Stiglitz (1970) definition of Mean Preserving Spreads to scalar diffusion processes. We provide sufficient conditions under which a family of diffusion processes satisfies the dynamic counterparts to the famous Rothschild and Stiglitz integral conditions. We prove that the only Brownian bridge with non-constant drift that displays the Dynamic...