There is ample empirical evidence for developed economies that asset prices contain information about future economic developments. But is this also the case in transition economies? Using a panel of monthly data for the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, and Slovenia for the...

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 natural interest rate is of great relevance to central banks, but it is difficult to measure. We show that in a standard microfounded monetary model, the natural interest rate co-moves with a transformation of the money demand that can be computed from actual data. The co-movement is of a...

Relative GDP shares are frequently used as weights in aggregations. In order to ensure that these weights reflect countries’ shares in real output, GDP data in national currencies should be converted into a common numeraire currency at purchasing power parity (PPP) rates. A review of the...

There is a vast body of literature estimating the impact of financial development on economic growth, inequality, and economic stability. A typical empirical study approximates financial development with either one of two measures of financial depth - the ratio of private credit to GDP or stock...

This paper shows how the role of Financial Soundness Indicators (FSIs) in financial surveillance can be usefully enhanced. Drawing from different statistical techniques, the paper illustrates that FSIs generate signals that can accurately detect, with 4 to 12 quarters lead, emerging financial...

Deregulation of the financial system often proceeds in tandem with macroeconomic stabilization centered on monetary and other financial targets. This paper presents a model where there may be conflict between these processes. The indicator properties of some financial variables may be rendered...

This paper presents background work that has been the basis for the development of the market and credit risk indicators (MRI and CRI, respectively) as published in the IMF''s Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR) since September 2004. The fundamental idea was to build a set of Financial...

In this paper, we use a bank-level panel dataset to investigate the determinants of bank interest margins in the Caucasus and Central Asia (CCA) over the period 1998-2013. We apply the dealership model of Ho and Saunders (1981) and its extensions to assess the extent to which high spreads of...