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...

In this paper, we first introduce investment-specific technology (IST) shocks to an otherwise standard international real business cycle model and show that a thoughtful calibration of them along the lines of Raffo (2009) successfully addresses the ""quantity"", ""international comovement"",...

This paper examines how durable goods and financial frictions shape the business cycle of a small open economy subject to shocks to trend and transitory shocks. In the data, nondurable consumption is not as volatile as income for both developed and emerging market economies. The simulation of...

This note discusses the implications of the price shocks for the balance of payments of low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The response by bilateral donors and multilateral institutions will, in practice, need to be country-specific. To this end, the note identifies a list of 18...

The introduction of inflation targeting in 2006, together with important economic developments such as dedollarization, marked the beginning of a new macroeconomic framework in Armenia, which is likely to have changed the effectiveness of monetary policy. This paper is the first attempt to...

To better respond to the unprecedented demand from the membership for financing and crisis support in response to the covid-19 pandemic, there is a temporary postponement of staff's work on Article IV consultations and mandatory Financial Stability Assessments. To ensure the postponement has no...

Over the last two decades a number of cross-country empirical studies have been undertaken to assess whether IMF-supported adjustment programs have led to an improved balance of payments and current account balance, lower inflation, and higher growth. These studies use a variety of methodologies...

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 presents an econometric model of U.S. current account transactions. The model is used to analyze the factors behind the deterioration in the U.S. external position during the 1980s and to examine the sensitivity of the U.S. current account balance to changes in factors which are its...

This paper considers the demand for various monetary aggregates with a view to assessing their potential roles as intermediate variables for monetary policy. Illustrative estimates using a generalized autoregressive distributed lag model are presented. For M1, the results support an “error...