Risks to macroeconomic stability posed by excessive private leverage are significantly amplified by tax distortions. 'Debt bias' (tax provisions favoring finance by debt rather than equity) has increased leverage in both the household and corporate sectors, and is now widely recognized as a...

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 IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

Using Chilean data, we document that for resource-rich small open economies the effects of terms of trade shocks on the wage gap (between skilled and unskilled workers) depend on factor intensities in the non-tradable sector, following the model in Galiani, Heymann, and Magud (2010). For a...

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...

In the past decade, most of the EU New Member States experienced a severe credit-boom bust cycle. This paper argues that the credit boom-bust cycle was to a large extent the result of factors external to the region (“bad luck”). Rapid credit growth followed from a high liquidity in global...

Export credit agencies (ECAs) have played a critical role in financing for developing countries in recent years, and officially supported export credits have been growing in volume. The current export credit exposure to developing countries and economies in transition has reached almost half a...

We identify different sources of risk as important determinants of banks' corporate structures when expanding into new markets. Subsidiary-based corporate structures benefit from greater protection against economic risk because of affiliate-level limited liability, but are more exposed to the...