This special issue is devoted to the Global Economy Model (GEM), a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models widely used by the IMF and central banks worldwide to study issues that cannot be adequately addressed with reduced-form econometric models or an earlier generation of macromodels...

This special issue on exchange rates is drawn from the Eighth Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference held at the International Monetary Fund in Washington in November 2007. The Mundell-Fleming Lecture by Stanley Fischer focuses on exchange rate systems, surveillance, and advice. Jeffrey...

In this issue, authors from the IMF and from Argentine institutions team up to review how different banks behaved and were hurt during the country's crisis. Atsushi Iimi looks at how countries can escape from the resource curse in a comparative analysis that focuses on Botswana. John Cady and...

In this issue, John T. Cuddington and Daniel Jerrett from the Colorado School of Mines examine whether metals prices are in a ""super cycle"" upswing driven by intensive economic growth in China, in particular. Using evidence from U.S. Social Security records, James E. Duggan, Robert Gillingham,...

This special issue brings together world-renowned experts to provide a systematic and critical analysis of the costs and benefits of financial globalization. Contributors include Kenneth Rogoff, Maurice Obstfeld, Dani Rodrik, and Frederic S. Mishkin

China’s growth performance since the start of economic reforms in 1978 has been impressive, but the gains have not been distributed equally across provinces. We use a nonparametric approach to analyze the variation in labor productivity growth across China’s provinces. This approach imposes...

Studies of the impact of trade openness on growth are based either on crosscountry analysis—which lacks transparency—or case studies—which lack statistical rigor. This paper applies a transparent econometric method drawn from the treatment evaluation literature (matching estimators) to...

This paper empirically evaluates four types of costs that may result from an international sovereign default: reputational costs, international trade exclusion costs, costs to the domestic economy through the financial system, and political costs to the authorities. It finds that the economic...

Do highly indebted countries suffer from a debt overhang? Can debt relief foster their growth rates? To answer these important questions, this article looks at how the debt-growth relation varies with indebtedness levels, as well as with the quality of policies and institutions, in a panel of...

This paper introduces a new database of financial reforms covering 91 economies over 1973-2005. It describes the content of the database, the information sources utilized, and the coding rules used to create an index of financial reform. It also compares the database with other measures of...