The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

The effect of the exchange rate regime on inflation and growth is examined. The 30-year data set includes over 100 countries and nine regime types. Pegged regimes are associated with lower inflation than intermediate or flexible regimes. This anti-inflationary benefit reflects lower money supply...

We study the macroeconomic consequences of tariffs. We estimate impulse response functions from local projections using a panel of annual data that spans 151 countries over 1963-2014. We find that tariff increases lead, in the medium term, to economically and statistically significant declines...

In this paper we argue that adherence to the gold standard rule of convertibility of national currencies into a fixed weight of gold served as `a good housekeeping seal of approval' which facilitated access by peripheral countries to foreign capital from the core countries of western Europe. We...

Over the past decade and a half Axel Leijonhufvud has written extensively on monetary regimes and their connection to nominal and real economic performance. Monetary regimes are important because they determine whether countries follow stable or unstable monetary policies and hence have stable...

Do structural reforms that aim to boost potential output also change the distribution of income? We shed light on this question by looking at the broad patterns in the cross-country data covering advanced, emerging-market, and low-income countries. Our main finding is that there is indeed...