According to the conventional wisdom, when an economy enters a recession and nominal prices adjust slowly, the monetary authority should devalue the domestic currency to make the recession less severe. The reason is that a devaluation of the currency lowers the relative price of non-tradable...

This paper looks at the correlation between the cyclical components of gross domestic product and the exchange rate and classifies countries'currencies as procyclical if they appreciate in good times, countercyclical if they appreciate in bad times, and acyclical otherwise. With this...

Previous studies have established a negative relationship between total government spending and entrepreneurship activity. However, the relationship between the composition of government spending and entrepreneurial activity has been woefully under-researched. This paper fills this gap in the...

This paper identifies the international credit channel of monetary policy by analyzing the universe of corporate loans in Mexico, matched with firm and bank balance-sheet data, and by exploiting foreign monetary policy shocks, given the large presence of European and U.S. banks in Mexico. The...

The global financial crisis and its aftermath have triggered extraordinary policy responses in advanced countries. The impacts of these policy responses?from asset price bubbles to currency depreciations?have often been felt in the developing world. As tapering talk evolves into actual...

Given the impact of the multipillar approach to pension reform and the diversity of its implementation, the authors, who presented papers at the 1999 conference on "New Ideas About Old Age Security," re-examine the evidence and thinking on pensions and retirement security. This report examines...

The great recession of 2008-9 caused a negative shock to the global economy that is comparable with the great depression of the 1930s. The major advanced nations experienced painful economic contraction, severe dislocation to industrial production and sharp spikes in unemployment. Trade flows...

Evidence from a large panel of low-income and lower middle-income countries over the period 1995-2012 suggests that, contrary to other countries, public investment in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) has been pro-cyclical. Public investment contracts more in"bad times"than it...

Using non-linear methods, this paper finds that existing estimates of government spending multipliers in expansion and recession may yield biased results by ignoring whether government spending is increasing or decreasing. For industrial countries, the problem originates in the fact that,...

En este documento se caracteriza la relación entre el gasto social, sus clasificaciones funcionales y el PIB en la región en el período1980-2008 a través de la estimación de las elasticidades PIB de corto y de largo plazo del gasto social y sus componentes para diez paísesseleccionados de...