While there is growing evidence of persistent or even permanent output losses from financial crises, the causes remain unclear. One candidate is intangible capital - a rising driver of economic growth that, being non-pledgeable as collateral, is vulnerable to financial frictions. By sheltering...

We study bank portfolio allocations during the transition of the real sector to a knowledge economy in which firms use less tangible capital and invest more in intangible assets. We show that, as firms shift toward intangible assets that have lower collateral values, banks reallocate their...

We propose a tax-adjusted q model with physical and intangible assets and estimate it with a self-collected comprehensive database of intangible assets. The presence of intangibles changes the accounting and economic measures of q. We show that when tax changes are temporary, the q model can be...

Intangible investment is growing as a share of economic activity. We present a simple framework incorporating its distinguishing characteristic of generally greater scalability and lower marginal costs than tangible investment. We show evidence that this may have contributed to more elastic...

We study the role of financial frictions in explaining the sharp and persistent productivity growthslowdown in advanced economies after the 2008 global financial crisis. Using a rich cross-country,firm-level data set and exploiting quasi-experimental variation in firm-level exposure to the...

This paper investigates empirically the drivers of financial imbalances ahead of the global financial crisis. Three factors may have contributed to the build-up of financial imbalances: (i) rising global imbalances (capital flows), (ii) monetary policy that might have been too loose, (iii)...

The effectiveness of the monetary policy transmission mechanism in open economies could be impaired if interest rates are driven primarily by global factors, especially during periods of large capital inflows. The main objective of this paper is to assess whether this is true for emerging Asia's...

Issues of taxation and development, which have long been a central concern of the IMF, have attracted wider and renewed interest in the last few years. This paper reflects on three broad lessons of experience: that developing countries differ vastly in tax matters, and in ways that are less than...

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries using a structural vector autoregressive model. The results indicate that the interest rate and bank lending channels are relatively effective in influencing...

It is generally acknowledged that the government’s output is difficult to define and its value is hard to measure. The practical solution, adopted by national accounts systems, is to equate output to input costs. However, several studies estimate significant inefficiencies in government...