Prior actions are measures that need to be implemented prior to Board approval of an IMFsupported program. This paper examines whether such prior actions can signal a willingness to implement reforms, especially when the member's track record is weak. We find some support for this signaling...

Does policy conditionality worsen domestic welfare, as governments are forced to attempt unpopular reforms resulting in damaging protests, or does conditionality help implement reforms that otherwise would have been impossible? This paper analyzes these questions. Using a game-theoretic...

This paper investigates fiscal developments in 112 countries during the 1990s. It finds that, while the overall fiscal balance improved in most of them, the composition of this improvement differed. In nonprogram countries, revenues increased modestly and expenditure declined sharply, while in...

This paper assesses the dynamics of the term structure of interest rates in the United States in light of the financial crisis in 2007-10. In particular, this paper assesses the dynamics of the term structure of U.S. Treasury security yields in light of economic and financial events and the...

Over the past two years, the IMF staff has been developing a new multicountry macroeconomic model called the Global Economy Model (GEM). This paper explains why such a model is needed, how GEM differs from its predecessor model, and how the new features of the model can improve the IMF’s...

We develop a tractable small open-economy model to study the first-round effects of international food price shocks in developing countries. We define first-round effects as changes in headline inflation that, holding core inflation constant, help implement relative price adjustments. The model...

This paper analyzes how differences in legal origin, judicial efficiency, and investor protection affect firm leverage and earnings volatility across developing countries. Using a large number of developing countries, four main findings are highlighted. First, firms in civil legal origin...

This paper presents the DIGNAR (Debt, Investment, Growth, and Natural Resources) model, which can be used to analyze the debt sustainability and macroeconomic effects of public investment plans in resource-abundant developing countries. DIGNAR is a dynamic, stochastic model of a small open...

A new aggregation scheme used to measure the sources of fiscal financing of indebted countries suggests that there was a fundamental improvement in the seniority of domestic debt at the expense of foreign bank debt during the late 1980s. We argue that this was the revenue maximizing response of...