"We examine how financial expansion and contraction cycles affect the broader economy through their impact on 8 real economic sectors in a panel of 28 countries over 1960-2005, paying particular attention to large, or sharp, contractions and magnifying and mitigating factors. Overall, the...

The federal government enacted massive spending in the Pandemic Recession. But was this spending scaled to the magnitude of the economic downturn? We examine the responsiveness of the safety net to the Pandemic Recession and compare it to that in the Great Recession. Using monthly state-level...

We find that financial conditions in the core have significant spillover effects on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). On average, a 1 percentage point easing of the IMF US Financial Conditions Index is associated with approximately a 10% higher volume of cross-border M&As. The...