This paper provides new empirical evidence on the degree of nominal wage flexibility in a sample of nineteen industrial countries. Across countries, aggregate uncertainty increases the degree of wage flexibility in the face of various shocks. Wage flexibility stabilizes fluctuations in real...

Information on seasonal frequencies can provide valuable insights for understanding economic fluctuations. This is particularly true for Italy, where the variability of production in manufacturing is extremely high and almost entirely due to seasonal factors. This paper discusses the option of...

This paper uses a general equilibrium model to examine the central role played by commercial banks in intermediating and amplifying the capital flow shocks to the local economy in the 1997 Asia financial crisis. It finds that a sudden stop of capital inflows affects the equilibrium credit supply...

In the context of the U.K. government’s EMU entry condition of cyclical convergence, this paper (i) provides further evidence suggesting that historically the U.K.’s business cycle has been more volatile than, and relatively independent of, the cycles in the euro-area countries; and (ii)...

This paper examines the impact of international financial integration on macroeconomic volatility in a large group of industrial and developing economies over the period 1960-99. We report two major results: First, while the volatility of output growth has, on average, declined in the 1990s...

The positive impact of foreign aid is limited by the erratic behavior of aid flows. The introduction in 1999 of various initiatives anchored in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) which were aimed at strengthening coordination among donors, improving the design of financial support...

This paper identifies factors that contribute to a fast recovery in growth after persistent negative terms of trade shocks, using a sample of 159 countries for 1970-2006. The results suggest that policies matter. Fast recoveries are fairly robustly related to real exchange rate depreciation and...

This paper empirically assesses the impact of oil price shocks on the underlying non-oil economic cycle in oil-exporting countries. Panel VAR analysis and the associated impulse responses indicate that in countries where the oil sector is large in relation to the economy, oil price changes...

The stylized facts of government finance in the Group of Seven (G-7) industrial countries show that revenues lag real GDP procyclically, while government spending in most cases fails to lead the economy procyclically. This finding is not confined to transfers but also applies to the wage...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian DSGE model with an explicit financial intermediary sector. Having measures of financial stress, such as the spread between lending and borrowing, enables the model to capture the impact of the financial crisis in a more direct and efficient way. The model...