After a decade of rapid growth, industrialization has lost ground with shrinking manufacturing sector and high informality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper explores how land market and labor regulations affect factor allocative efficiency and firm performance in SSA. Using pooled data on...

This paper uses the Growth-at-Risk (GaR) methodology to examine how macrofinancial conditions affect the growth outlook and its probability distribution. Using this approach, we evaluate risks to GDP growth in the Dominican Republic using quarterly data for 1996-2018. We group macrofinancial...

Consumer price indexes (CPIs) are compiled at the higher (weighted) level using Laspeyres-type arithmetic averages. This paper questions the suitability of such formulas and considers two counterpart alternatives that use geometric averaging, the Geometric Young and the (price-updated) Geometric...

A key element in the build-up to the global recession and subsequently was the movement in house price indexes (HPIs). These indexes are particularly prone to methodological and coverage differences which can undermine both within-country and cross-country economic analysis. The paper outlines...

While expanding public investment can help filling infrastructure bottlenecks, scaling up too much and too fast often leads to inefficient outcomes. This paper rationalizes this outcome looking at the association between cost inflation and public investment in a large sample of road construction...

To identify and quantify downside risks to housing markets, we apply the house price-at-risk methodology to a sample of 37 cities across the United States and Canada using quarterly data from 1983 to 2018. This paper finds that downside risks to housing markets in the United States have...

This paper applies state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to develop the first sentiment index measuring member countries' reception of IMF policy advice at the time of Article IV Consultations. This paper finds that while authorities of member countries largely agree with Fund advice, there...

We show that a dynamic general equilibrium model with efficiency wages and endogenous capital accumulation in both the formal and (non-agricultural) informal sectors can explain the full range of confounding stylized facts associated with minimum wage laws in less developed countries

Guyana's residential real estate prices have been rising, particularly in the capital city Georgetown, following the discovery of oil in 2015. In line with the growing demand for housing, commercial banks' housing loans have increased, prompting higher household debt. This paper presents two...

This paper studies the impact of tax-based consolidations on reelection outcomes. Using a granular database of tax-based consolidations for a panel of 10 OECD countries over the last 40 years, we find that tax reforms are politically costly but some reforms are costlier than others. Measures...