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• Economic miracles, such as the Asian miracles, are not statistical accident to be ignored, and they are not as rare as commonly assumed i.e., the distribution of cross-country long-term growth follows a Power law. • Disentangling the role of policies from luck implies that economic miracles are alike, and every failure is a failure in its own way. High and sustained growth depends on maintaining the best possible policies while not being too unlucky. • The relatively few successes in achieving high and sustained growth such as the Asian miracles should constitute a focal point for the study of development policies. • In contrast, results derived from a large pool of development failures should be taken with skepticism, especially if it is based on the study of growth in the short to medium run. We show evidence that development "miracles," such as the Asian Miracles, may not be that rare as the distribution of cross-country long-term growth follows a Power Law. We propose a growth theory, disantangling the role of policies from luck, which is consistent with this stylized fact and predicts that high growth depends on maintaining the best possible policies while not being too unlucky. We argue that miracles are all alike and every failure is a failure in its own way, suggesting that the few growth miracles hold more clues about good policies than the vast number of growth failures. We infer important implications for the study of economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Using the IMF country reports for 1978-2019 and text analytics, we identify four narratives about growth economics. • With a vocabulary of more than 100 concepts, we find much lower occurrence of concepts from growth theory. • Major events such as economic crises and political leadership changes tend to affect the direction of growth narratives. • We propose a nexus of the pool of economic ideas, power structure, and trigger events to interpret the shift in narratives. The debate among economists about an optimal growth recipe has been the subject of competing "narratives." We identify-four major growth narratives using the text analytics of IMF country reports over 1978–2019. The narrative "Economic Structure"—services, manufacturing, and agriculture—has been on a secular decline overshadowed by the "Structural Reforms"—competitiveness, transparency, and governance. We observe the rise and fall of the "Washington Consensus"—privatization and liberalization—and the rise to dominance of the "Washington Constellation," a collection of many disparate terms such as productivity, tourism, and inequality. We interpret these changes through the lens of a nexus of the changing pool of economic ideas, the power structure within organizations, and the shocks that trigger a shift of narratives and their translation into policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the impact of macroeconomic shocks on US public debt dynamics using a VAR with debt feedback. Following a primary balance, or austerity, shock, the debt ratio initially declines but at a cost of lower growth. The debt ratio then rises to its pre-shock path, suggesting the austerity shock could be self-defeating. An inflation shock reduces the debt ratio initially, while a positive growth shock unambiguously lowers debt. Our specification, properly incorporating the debt equation, produces different debt impulse responses and forecasts from VAR models either excluding debt or including debt linearly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]