This paper addresses the proper measurement of financial service output that is not priced explicitly. It shows how to impute nominal service output from financial intermediaries' interest income and how to construct price indices for those financial services. We present an optimizing model with...

This paper studies how minimum wage policies affect firm employment in China using a unique county level minimum wage data set matched to disaggregated firm survey data. We investigate both the effect of imposing a minimum wage, and the effect of the policies that tightened enforcement in 2004....

We examine the behavior of forecasts for real GDP growth using a large panel of individual forecasts from 30 advanced and emerging economies during 1989-2010. Our main findings are as follows. First, our evidence does not support the validity of the sticky information model (Mankiw and Reis,...

In this paper we present and analyze the IMF's labor market recommendations for advanced economies since the beginning of the crisis, both in general and specifically in program countries. Our analysis is informed by our reading of the theoretical and empirical literature on the design of labor...

We show that an increase in aggregate uncertainty - measured by stock market volatility - reduces productivity growth more in industries that depend heavily on external finance. The mechanism at play is that during periods of high uncertainty, firms that are credit constrained switch the...

There is a consensus among academics and policymakers that the excess savings built up by households during the past couple of years are specific to the pandemic. Based on data from the past half century for the US, this article shows that savings generally increase during recessions; the...

This paper asks how well Okun's Law fits short-run unemployment movements in the United States since 1948 and in twenty advanced economies since 1980. We find that Okun's Law is a strong and stable relationship in most countries, one that did not change substantially during the Great Recession....

For decades, mainstream economics has focused on increasing economic growth and accelerating cross-country convergence, while ignoring distributional concerns. However, the consensus has begun to shift, and recent IMF research has paid increased attention to inclusive growth and the detrimental...