COVID-19 became a global health emergency when it threatened the catastrophic collapse of health systems worldwide. Its particular mix of rapid spread and severity caused demand for health goods and services and their relative prices to surge, unlike other diseases that are deadlier (e.g. Ebola,...

During the period 1991-93, Finland experienced the deepest economic downturn in an industrialized country since the 1930s. We argue that the culprit behind this Great Depression was the collapse of Finnish trade with the Soviet Union, because it induced a costly restructuring of the...

Theory predicts that strategically-determined tax rates induce negative externalities across countries in relative prices, the wealth distribution and tax revenue. This paper studies the interaction of these externalities in a dynamic, general equilibrium environment and its effects on...

Recent quantitative studies predict large welfare gains from reducing tax distortions in a closed economy, despite costly transitional dynamics to more efficient tax systems. This paper examines transitional dynamics and gains of tax reforms for countries in a global economy, and provides...

This paper proposes a method for computing tax rates using national accounts and revenue statistics. Using this method we construct time-series of tax rates for large industrial countries. The method identifies the revenue raised by different taxes at the general government level and defines...

What are the macroeconomic effects of tax adjustments in response to large public debt shocks in highly integrated economies? The answer from standard closed-economy models is deceptive, because they underestimate the elasticity of capital tax revenues and ignore cross-country spillovers of tax...

Variance decompositions of the Mexico-United States real exchange rate are examined using monthly data on consumer prices and the nominal exchange rate for the period January, 1969 to February, 2000. The results show that the robust result found in industrial-country data that most of the...

This paper shows that the quantitative predictions of a DSGE model with an endogenous collateral constraint are consistent with key features of the emerging markets' Sudden Stops. Business cycle dynamics produce periods of expansion during which the ratio of debt to asset values raises enough to...

The current account reversals, large recessions, and price collapses that define Sudden Stops contradict the predictions of a large class of models in which the current account is a vehicle for consumption smoothing and investment financing. This paper shows that the quantitative predictions of...

This paper reports results for a class of dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium models with credit constraints that can account for some of the empirical regularities of the Sudden Stop phenomenon of recent emerging markets crises. In these models, credit constraints set in motion Irving...