While the world is focused on addressing the near-term ramifications of the COVID-19 shock, we turn attention to another important aspect of the pandemic: its fallout on medium-term potential output through scarring. Taking Australia and New Zealand as examples, we show that the pandemic will...

Going forward, Korea faces two closely related challenges: sustaining economic growth against the backdrop of a rapidly aging population and ameliorating income inequality. This paper argues that a gradual increase in social spending could promote more sustainable and inclusive growth in Korea....

This paper outlines an approach to assess uncertainty around a forecast baseline as well as the impact of alternative policy rules on macro variability. The approach allows for non-Gaussian shock distributions and non-linear underlying macroeconomic models. Consequently, the resulting...

We estimate a New Keynesian small open economy model which allows for foreign exchange (FX) market frictions and a potential role for FX interventions for a large set of emerging market economies (EMEs) and some inflation targeting (IT) advanced economy (AE) countries serving as a control group....

This paper quantifies the savings obtained from risk pooling with a Regional Stabilization Fund (RSF) for the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union. A Monte Carlo experiment is used to estimate the size of a RSF conditional on probabilities of depletion under specific saving-withdrawal rules. Results...

This paper estimates insurance requirements against natural disasters (NDs) in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) using an insurance layering framework. The layers include a government saving fund, as well as market instruments. Each layer is calibrated to cover estimated fiscal cost of...

We provide a long-run perspective on neutral interest rates with new estimates for 16 advanced economies since the 1870s using the Laubach and Williams approach. Our estimates differ substantially from commonly used proxies. We find that, while cross-country heterogeneity was significant in the...

This paper investigates whether there is a different impact from changes in quot;newquot; and quot;oldquot; economy stock valuations on private investment for seven OECD economies. A vector autoregressive model is estimated for each individual country, using quarterly data over the period...

This paper investigates if there is a different impact from changes in quot;newquot; and quot;oldquot; economy stock valuations on private consumption. Estimating a reduced-form VAR for seven OECD countries for the 1990s, it is found that the impact from changes in old economy stock valuations...

The Western Balkan countries have some of the lowest female labor force participation and employment rates across Europe. Almost two-thirds of working age women in the region are either inactive or unemployed: a huge bite into human capital for a region that endures high emigration and faces...