Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly an important vehicle for several Western Balkan countries to increase investment to reduce their infrastructure gaps. While there are benefits to well-designed and implemented PPPs, they also carry a potential for large fiscal risks and...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the impact of NAFTA on growth and business cycles in Mexico. The effect of the agreement in spurring a dramatic increase in trade and financial flows between Mexico and its NAFTA partners, and its impact on Mexican economic growth and business...

Abstract: Both global and regional economic linkages have strengthened substantially over the past quarter century. We employ a dynamic factor model to analyze the implications of these linkages for the evolution of global and regional business cycles. Our model allows us to assess the roles...

This paper examines the relative importance of external shocks as sources of business cycle fluctuations in Mexico, and identifies the dynamic responses of domestic output to foreign disturbances. Using a VAR model with block exogeneity restrictions, it finds that U.S. shocks explain a large...

The paper extends the work of Deaton (2021) by exploring the period of post-crisis recovery in 2021-2024. The paper documents per-capita income divergence during the period of post-shock recovery, with countries at the bottom of the income distribution falling significantly behind. Findings...

This paper introduces a new dataset on the composition of the investor base for government securities in the G20 advanced economies and the euro area. During the last decades, investors from abroad have increased their presence in government bond markets. The financial crisis broke this trend....

The paper presents a methodology for measuring the clarity of central bank communication, illustrating it with the case of the European Central Bank (ECB) in 1999-2007. The analysis identifies the ECB's written communication as clear about 95 percent of instances, which is comparable to, or even...

Central banks have recently adjusted their communication strategies to enhance engagement with the general public, yet there is limited understanding of public sentiment regarding monetary policy announcements. This paper investigates whether monetary policy announcements influence household...

This paper develops a new data-driven metric to capture MacroEconomic Uncertainty (MEU) in the euro area. The measure is constructed as the conditional volatility of the unforecastable components of a large set of time series, accounting for the monetary union as well as cross-country...