We estimate the short-term effects of fiscal consolidation on economic activity in 14countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. We examine contemporaneous policy documents to identify changes in fiscal policy motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by responding to...

Latin America's central banks have made substantial progress towards delivering an environment of price stability that is supportive of sustainable economic growth. We review these achievements, and discuss remaining challenges facing central banking in the region. Where inflation remains high...

As the Federal Reserve continues to normalize its monetary policy, this paper studies the impact of U.S. interest rates on rates in other countries. We find a modest but nontrivial pass-through from U.S. to domestic short-term interest rates on average. We show that, to a large extent, this...

Is the Mundell-Fleming trilemma alive and well? International co-movement of asset prices takes place along side synchronized business cycles, complicating the identification of financial spillovers and assessments of monetary policy autonomy. A benchmark for interest rate co-movement is to...

This paper recounts Chile's experience with capital account policies since the 1990s. We present how two external shocks were confronted under very different macroeconomic and capital account frameworks. We show that during the 1997-98 Asian-LTCM-Russia crisis, a closed capital account and...

A long-standing conjecture in macroeconomics is that recent declines in exchange rate pass-through are in part due to improved monetary policy performance. In a large sample of emerging and advanced economies, we find evidence of a strong link between exchange rate pass-through to consumer...

Inflation in low-income countries is often high and volatile, driven by external shocks. In addition, inflation in fragile states is affected by highly volatile domestic factors that complicate monetary policy’s ability to deliver price stability. We estimate the drivers of inflation in Guinea...

This Paper compares the dynamic impact of fiscal policy on macroeconomic variables implied by a large class of general equilibrium models with the empirical results from an identified vector autoregression. In the data we find that positive innovations in government spending are followed by...

This Paper studies how discretionary fiscal policy affects output volatility and the rate of economic growth. Using data on fifty-one countries we isolate five empirical regularities: (1) Governments that use often fiscal policy make their economies volatile; (2) The use of fiscal policy is...

This paper examines the relationship between fiscal policy and the current account, drawing on a larger country sample than in previous studies and using panel regressions, vector auto-regressions, and an analysis of large fiscal and external adjustments. On average, a strengthening in the...