This paper explores the nexus between the financial cycle and business cycle in Brazil. Cycles are estimated using a variety of commonly-used statistical methods and with a small, semistructural model of the Brazilian economy. An advantage of using the model-based approach is that financial and...

This paper develops comparable financial conditions indices (FCIs) for the six large and most financially-integrated Latin American economies (LA6) by following Korobilis (2013) and Koop and Korobilis (2014). The main findings are as follows. First, the estimated FCIs are influenced by a...

This paper proposes a new index of sectoral labor distortion using employment and valueadded shares. We show that this index is highly correlated with growth both crosssectionally and over time. We also use it to compare the degree of distortion among countries and identify sectors where the...

This paper describes the result and the methodology of updating nominal and real effective exchange rate weights on the basis of trade data over 1999-2001. The underlying framework is an updated version of the IMF''s current effective exchange rate calculation, which uses weights largely based...

Price index compilers frequently face situations where price observations are missing due to seasonal unavailability, supply shortages, or the discontinuation of products. Incorrect treatment of such situations can result in biased price indices. This paper presents statistical imputation...

Corruption, particularly political or “grand” corruption, distorts the entire decision-making process connected with public investment projects. The degree of distortions is higher with weaker auditing institutions. The evidence presented shows that higher corruption is associated with (i)...

This paper introduces a new index that captures the institutional environment underpinning public investment management across four different stages: project appraisal, selection, implementation, and evaluation. Covering 71 countries, including 40 low-income countries, the index allows for...