The economies of Central America share a close relationship with the United States, with considerable comovement of GDP growth over a long period of time. Trade, the financial sector, and remittance flows are all potential channels through which the U.S. cycle could affect the region. But just...

Credit is key to support healthy and sustainable economic growth but excess aggregate credit growth can signal the build-up of imbalances and lead to systemic financial crisis. Hence, monitoring the credit cycle is key to identifying vulnerabilities, particularly in emerging markets, which tend...

This paper examines the role of disaster shock in a one-sector, representative agent dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE). First, it estimates a panel vector autoregresive (VAR) model for output, investment, trade balance, consumption, and country spread to capture the economic...

Credit is key to support healthy and sustainable economic growth but excess aggregate credit growth can signal the build-up of imbalances and lead to systemic financial crisis. Hence, monitoring the credit cycle is key to identifying vulnerabilities, particularly in emerging markets, which tend...

This paper examines the role of disaster shock in a one-sector, representative agent Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model. Firstly, we estimate a Panel Vector Autoregresive (VAR) model for output, investment, trade balance, consumption and country spread to capture the economic...

Opportunities for growth and investment in Central America could well improve in the coming years, as the region’s ties with the world economy grow closer. This integration, however, also presents important challenges for economic policy to ensure that growth can be sustained and can benefit...

We argue for the resurrection of an old idea: electricity use as an indicator of U.S. economic activity. Our analysis relies on associations - the 40-year correlation between growth rates in real GDP and electricity use can be as high as 89% - and intuition. Electricity use and economic...