Publications

While fiscal rules are often viewed as an effective way to curb the deficit bias arising from, inter alia, partisan pressures in common-pool budget settings, much less is known about how their effects vary with partisan preferences. This paper fills that gap by estimating local projections for a panel of EU-27 countries over 1995-2019. We innovatively link COFOG expenditure categories with the Manifesto Project Database to study how political preferences condition the impact of tighter fiscal rules across spending functions. Our first result is that more stringent national fiscal rules are associated with lower public spending in the short-and medium-run. Digging deeper, we show that the recomposition of expenditure under tighter rules depends on governments' preferences: adjustment falls disproportionately on categories that are less favoured by the incumbent. These results are robust to alternative estimators, different definitions of the dependent variable, and placebo tests. Lastly, the cuts associated with stricter fiscal rules in low-preference government contexts are amplified when sovereign debt yields are higher.

Climate change poses complex risks that extend beyond environmental impacts, shaping social and economic inequalities. This paper examines how physical risks, such as extreme weather, and transition risks, linked to decarbonization and green policies, affect women's empowerment in firms across developing and developed contexts. Using firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys and World Development Indicators, we measure empowerment through female employment, management, and ownership. Our results reveal contrasting effects: physical risks reduce female ownership, while transition risks boost female management, particularly in smaller, younger, non-exporting, and non-privately owned firms. The negative impact of physical risks is largely uniform, except in foreign-owned firms, and operates mainly through constraints on finance and land. These findings highlight the need for integrated climate and gender policies that recognize women not only as vulnerable to climate change but also as key agents of sustainable economic transformation.

This study examines how epidemic outbreaks influence foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in developing countries, with a particular focus on whether healthcare systems can act as buffers during such shocks. Using a panel dataset of 98 countries from 2000 to 2022, the analysis combines two-way fixed effects (FE) models and the Local Projection Method (LPM). The analysis is structured in three parts: First, fixed-effects regressions assess the average effect of 20 major epidemics on FDI, revealing that diseases such as Ebola, MERS, Lassa Fever, and Leptospirosis significantly reduce investment inflows. Second, local projection methods trace the short-and medium-term responses of FDI to health shocks by transmission type. The results show varying recovery patterns: while FDI tends to rebound after direct contact or mosquito-borne outbreaks, airborne diseases cause more persistent declines. Third, the study explores whether stronger healthcare systems can mitigate these negative effects. Results suggest that countries with a higher density of nurses experience less severe FDI losses during outbreaks, particularly for diseases transmitted through direct contact or bodily fluids. These findings underline the importance of healthcare investment not only for public health but also for economic resilience. By distinguishing effects across disease types and highlighting the moderating role of health infrastructure, this study offers practical insights for policymakers seeking to safeguard investment flows during times of crisis.

Environmental concerns are becoming more pressing as the climate emergency intensifies, posing a major challenge for many governments: increasing green investments to promote better adaptation and resilience to climate events, while maintaining fiscal discipline. This raises the question of whether governments that operate under fiscal rules tend to safeguard environmental spending in light of the climate emergency, or whether they are more inclined to scale it back to meet their fiscal targets, given that such investments require substantial public funding. Using data covering 31 advanced economies between 1995 and 2021, we find robust evidence that the strengthening of fiscal rules significantly reduces environmental spending, in particular debt rules and expenditure rules. Moreover, the adverse impact of fiscal rules on environmental expenditures is amplified during election periods, whereas it is mitigated in the presence of sound past fiscal conditions, the Kyoto Protocol, and stringent environmental policies. Further analysis reveals that although fiscal rules tend to reduce environmental spending, they are associated with greater efficiency in such spending.

This paper provides benchmark experimental evidence on how individuals trade off financial performance against the risk of disclosing their own financial information when privacy risks are explicit, and outcomes are immediate. In a laboratory investment task with repeated decisions, participants choose between two risky options that differ in expected return and in an explicitly stated probability that choosing one option triggers a pseudonymous disclosure of a limited subset of their pre-elicited financial information to other participants. Participants respond systematically to both return spreads and leak probabilities, but choices are substantially more elastic to financial incentives than to changes in leak risk. In dynamic analyses, experiencing an own leak has modest and short-lived effects, whereas higher leakage among other participants is followed by a lower propensity to select the privacy-risky option. Standard measures of risk and loss aversion and most economic characteristics explain little of the heterogeneity in choices, while context-relevant privacy attitudes are associated with more privacy-protective behavior. Overall, in this transparent-probability benchmark environment, monetary incentives dominate leak risk on average, while social information about others' leaks meaningfully shapes behavior.