Housing cycles and their impact on the financial system and the macroeconomy have become the center of attention following the global financial crisis. This paper documents the characteristics of housing cycles in a large set of countries, and examines the determinants of house price movements....

This paper provides evidence on the impact of major epidemics from the past two decades on income distribution. The pandemics in our sample, even though much smaller in scale than COVID-19, have led to increases in the Gini coefficient, raised the income share of higher-income deciles, and...

COVID-19 has had a disruptive economic impact in 2020, but how long its impact will persist remains unclear. We offer a prognosis based on an analysis of the effects of five previous major epidemics in this century. We find that these pandemics led to significant and persistent reductions in...

Central bankers often assert that low inflation and anchoring of inflation expectations are good for economic growth (Bernanke 2007, Plosser 2007). We test this claim using panel data on sectoral growth for 22 manufacturing industries for 36 advanced and emerging market economies over the period...

We study the impact of fluctuations in global oil prices on domestic inflation using an unbalanced panel of 72 advanced and developing economies over the period from 1970 to 2015. We find that a 10 percent increase in global oil inflation increases, on average, domestic inflation by about 0.4...