This paper documents how informal employment in Mexico is countercyclical, lags the cycle and is negatively correlated to formal employment. This contributes to explaining why total employment in Mexico displays low cyclicality and variability over the business cycle when compared to Canada, a...

Fluctuations in commodity prices are an important driver of business cycles in small emerging market economies (EMEs). This paper documents how these fluctuations correlate strongly with the business cycle in EMEs. A commodity sector is then embedded into a multi-country EMEs business cycle...

This paper studies the influence of external financial factors on economic activity in emerging economies (EMEs) motivated by a considerable increase in foreign financing by the corporate sector in EMEs since the early 2000s, mainly in the form of bond issuance. A quarterly external financial...

Corporate sectors in emerging markets have noticeably increased their reliance on foreign financing, presumably reflecting low global interest rates. The evidence also shows a rebalancing from bank loans towards bonds. To study these developments, this paper develops a dynamic open economy model...