In the literature on exports and investment, most productive firms are seen to invest abroad. In the Helpman et al. (2004) model, costs of transportation play a critical role in the decision about whether to serve foreign customers by exporting, or by producing abroad. We consider the case of...

Using domestic and export price data and a framework of markup over cost, pricing behavior of U.S. and Japanese manufacturers is compared. Major export industries in Japan have higher productivity growth and lower pass-through coefficients than American exporters, who tend to price to domestic...

The ESF, established within the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility and Exogenous Shocks Facility (PRGF-ESF) Trust, complements existing Fund instruments for providing timely support, including financing at more appropriate terms, to low-income members that are facing sudden and exogenous...

Government spending plays a critical role in protecting and enforcing rights and civil liberties. Empirical evidence for a sample of industrial and developing countries shows that government expenditures on defense, law and order, social security, education, and health care are associated with...

This paper studies the effects of demand and supply shocks in the global crude oil market on several measures of countries'' external balance, including the oil and non-oil trade balances, the current account, and changes in net foreign assets (NFA) during 1975-2004. We explicitly take a global...

This paper examines the methodological issues arising in the measurement of the distributional impact of tax and expenditure policies, with emphasis on the problems related to the measurement of the impact of adjustment programs on the welfare of the poor. Both conceptual and empirical...

The paper evaluates whether a monetary aggregate can serve as a useful predictor of inflation, using recent developments in the principle of cointegrated variables. M2 but not M1 is cointegrated with relevant price, transactions, and rate of return variables. However, deviations of M2 from its...

This paper demonstrates how a full-blown optimizing model of the dynamics of the current account can be reduced to a small-scale collection of reduced-form relations capable of implementing a rich set of macro-economic simulations. Emphasizing the role of shocks to productivity, labor...

The paper applies an empirical model, based on the economic theory of public choice, to the Group of Seven countries. It is discovered: (a) that deficit financing does appear to contribute to increased real government spending; (b) that the demand for government services as a whole does not...