An unstable macroeconomic environment is often regarded as detrimental to economic growth. Among the sources contributing to such instability, the literature has assigned most of the blame to political issues. This paper empirically tests for a causal and negative long-term relation between political instability and economic growth, but finds no evidence of such a relationship. Sensitivity anal...

The state of capital markets looks particularly poor when we consider the efforts already undertaken to improve the macroeconomic environment and reform the institutions believed to foster financial development. In the case of Latin America, the results appear even more discouraging in light of the better evolution of capital markets in East Asia and their rapid growth in developed economies (e...

Most of the current literature on macroeconomic policies focus on cyclical phenomena such as politically induced business cycles, and how short-sighted policies can be overcome through proper institutional design. This paper instead focuses on the lasting effects of macroeconomic policies on such “real” economic variables as unemployment and distribution, and we argue that traditional distribut...

We present a model in which investors observe the same macroeconomic data but have varying levels of information about the parameters that determine the distribution of the expected returns on investment. During a crisis that increases macroeconomic uncertainty and reduces asset prices, the threshold required return that triggers investment is lower for an informed investor than for an uninform...

The credit market continues to be the main mechanism for financing investments in developing countries, particularly in Morocco. In this sense, monetary and macro-prudential policies require the inclusion of this market in macroeconomic analysis. In this article, we use the model proposed by Bernanke et al. (1999) "BGG" in the case of Morocco to answer two main questions: is there a mechanism f...

— Many developing and transitioning countries have difficulty sticking to sound macroeconomic policy. International donors are pushing recipient countries to forge a public consensus on macroeconomic policy as a means to enhance sustainability and impacts on the poor. Finance and budget officials, central bank staff, and economic policymakers, however, often assume that citizens cannot understa...