The 2008 crisis underscored the interconnectedness of the international business cycle, with U.S. shocks leading to the largest global slowdown since the 1930s. We estimate spillover effects across major advanced country regions in a structural VAR (SVAR) using pre-crisis data. Our new method...

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...

This paper examines the extent to which conclusions of cross-country studies of private savings are robust to allowing for the possible heterogeneity of savings behavior across countries and the inclusion of dynamics. It shows that neglecting heterogeneity and dynamics can lead to misleading...

This paper examines the macroeconomic impact of tariffs. Existing theoretical models do not provide clear-cut predictions concerning the co-movement between unilateral tariff changes and a set of macroeconomic variables consisting of the real exchange rate, the trade balance, and the level of...

This paper discusses the estimation of models of the term structure of interest rates. After reviewing the term structure models, specifically the Nelson-Siegel Model and Affine Term- Structure Model, this paper estimates the terms structure of Treasury bond yields for the United States with...

This paper develops a simple model for measuring potential output that uses data on inflation, unemployment, and capacity utilization. We apply the model to 10 countries, in addition to the United States and the euro area. While there is a substantial amount of uncertainty around our estimates,...

The Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) countries’ economies are heavily dependent on the United States for foreign direct investment, mainly in the tourism sector. The Selected Issues paper discusses economic development and policies of the ECCU. About one-third of the stayover tourists...

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...