This paper proposes a new definition of Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) and develops a statistical method to differentiate between OFCs and non-OFCs using data from the Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS), the International Investment Position (IIP), and the balance of payments. The...

Trade theories covering Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) are as diverse as the literature in search of their empirical support. To account for the model uncertainty that surrounds the validity of the competing PTA theories, we introduce Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to the PTA literature....

Since 1999, the IMF's staff has been tracking several early-warning-system (EWS) models of currency crisis. The results have been mixed. One of the long-horizon models has performed well relative to pure guesswork and to available non-model-based forecasts, such as agency ratings and private...

This Selected Issues paper examines the external linkages of the New Zealand economy. Empirical results from vector autoregressive models suggest that economic activity in Australia tends to have more of a significant direct impact on New Zealand than does activity in the United States....

This Selected Issues paper analyzes macroeconomic fluctuations in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). The paper describes data, along with the estimation technique used to ensure stationarity of the data. The empirical regularities of macroeconomic fluctuations in the ECCU are...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the sources of Mexico’s economic growth since the 1960s, and compares various decompositions of historical growth into trend and cyclical components. The role of the implied output gaps in the inflation process is assessed. The paper presents...

This paper studies stylized business cycle properties of household production in four industrialized countries (Canada, the United States, Germany, and Japan). We employ a dynamic small open economy business cycle model that incorporates a household production sector. We use the model to...

The output gap-which measures the deviation of actual output from its potential-is frequently used as an indicator of slack in an economy. This paper estimates the Finnish output gap using various empirical methods. It evaluates these methods against economic history and each other by a...

This paper studies the role of an increase in foreign exchange reserves in reducing currency volatility for emerging market countries. The study employs a panel of 28 countries over the period 1986-2002. Several control variables are introduced in the regressions to account for other factors...