This paper examines how endogenizing technological progress in a multicountry macroeconometric model affects the analysis of fiscal policies. It uses an expanded version of the IMF’s multicountry model, MULTIMOD, in which total factor productivity (TFP) is endogenized as a function of domestic...

An increasing body of evidence suggests that the behavior of the economy has changed in many fundamental ways over the last decades. In particular, greater financial deregulation, larger wealth accumulation, and better policies might have helped lower uncertainty about future income and lengthen...

Since the early 1980s, well over 100 countries have experienced systemic bank insolvencies. An important innovation among the resulting policies for reestablishing bank soundness has been the reliance on market-based instruments and policies, in contrast to the largely non-market-oriented...

China’s high corporate savings rate is commonly claimed to be a key driver for the country’s large current account surplus. The mainstream explanation for high corporate savings is a combination of windfall profits in state-owned firms, especially in resource sectors, and mis-governance of...

This paper analyzes the welfare benefits from falling relative prices of IT (information technology) goods across a wide range of countries. We find, using two separate methodologies and datasets, that welfare benefits mainly accrue to users of IT, not their producers, because of falling...

This paper examines some popular explanations for the smooth operation of the pre-1914 gold standard. We find that the rapid adjustment of economies to underlying disturbances played an important role in stabilizing output and employment under the gold standard system, but no evidence that this...