Exporters of exhaustible resources have historically exhibited higher income volatility than other economies, suggesting a heightened role for precautionary savings. This paper uses a parameterized small open-economy model to quantify the role of precautionary savings for exporters of...

This paper studies the effects of household income on labor participation and school enrollment of children aged 10 to 14 in Brazil using a social security reform as a source of exogenous variation in household income. We find that increased benefits are associated with increases in school...

I estimate the impact of social security benefits on retirement decisions of rural workers by studying changes in the rules governing old-age benefits for rural workers in Brazil. I focus on a reform implemented in 1991, which reduced the minimum eligibility age, increased benefits, and extended...

This paper shows that aggregate investment expenditure shares on tradable and nontradable goods are very similar in rich and poor countries, as well as in different regions of the world. Furthermore, the two expenditure shares have remained close to constant over time, with the average...

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...

This paper shows that an income effect can drive expenditure switching between domestic and foreign goods. We use a unique Latvian scanner-level dataset for food and beverages, covering the 2008-09 financial crisis, to study (i) relative price movements, and (ii) expenditure switching between...

The traditional multi-sector macro model without production inputs is a value-added trade model. This paper shows that calibrating such a misspecified value-added trade model to available gross-flow trade data – a common practice in the literature – can lead to mismeasured (i) preference...

We examine the role of cross-border input linkages in governing how international relative price changes influence demand for domestic value added. We define a novel value-added real effective exchange rate (REER), which aggregates bilateral value-added price changes, and link this REER to...

This paper updates the conceptual foundations for measuring real effective exchange rates (REERs) to allow for vertical specialization in trade. We derive a value-added REER describing how demand for the value added that a country produces changes as the price of its value added changes relative...

We survey recent literature on the causes of the collapse in international trade during the 2008-2009 global recession. We argue that the evidence points to the collapse in aggregate expenditure, concentrated on trade-intensive durable goods, as the main driver of the trade collapse. Inventory...