There is much confusion about what shadow banking is. Some equate it with securitization, others with non-traditional bank activities, and yet others with non-bank lending. Regardless, most think of shadow banking as activities that can create systemic risk. This paper proposes to describe...

This paper presents an approach to understanding the shadow banking system in the United States using a new Global Flow of Funds (GFF) conceptual framework developed by the IMF’s Statistics Department (STA). The GFF uses external stock and flow matrices to map claims between sector-location...

This paper examines the impact of thin capitalization rules that limit the tax deductibility of interest on the capital structure of the foreign affiliates of US multinationals. We construct a new data set on thin capitalization rules in 54 countries for the period 1982-2004. Using confidential...

This paper uses a newly constructed revenue dataset of 35 resource-rich countries for the period 1992-2009 to analyze the impact of expanding resource revenues on different types of domestic (non resource) tax revenues. Overall, we find a statistically significant negative relationship between...

The External Balance Assessment (EBA) methodology has been developed by the IMF’s Research Department as a successor to the CGER methodology for assessing current accounts and exchange rates in a multilaterally consistent manner. Compared to other approaches, EBA emphasizes distinguishing...

The North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008-2009 has spurred renewed interest in reforming the international monetary system, which has been malfunctioning in many aspects. Large and volatile capital flows have promoted greater volatility in financial markets, leading to recurrent financial...

This paper investigates the potential relationships between financial structures and economic outcomes. The empirical results that withstand a battery of methods suggest that some financial intermediation structures are likely to be more closely related to positive economic outcomes than others....

The paper explores the extent to which the pressure of debt service on other spending items may push governments to embark on fiscal consolidation beyond what is strictly necessary to secure solvency. The empirical analysis identifies thresholds of interest bill indicators beyond which...