Commodity-exporting countries have significantly benefited from the commodity price boom of recent years. At the current juncture, however, uncertain global economic prospects have raised questions about their vulnerability to a sharp fall in commodity prices and the policies that can shield it...

We build a small open economy, real business cycle model with labor market frictions to evaluate the role of employment protection in shaping business cycles in emerging economies. The model features matching frictions and an endogenous selection effect by which inefficient jobs are destroyed in...

With another real estate boom-bust bringing woes to the world economy, a quest for a better policy toolkit to deal with these boom-busts has begun. Macroprudential measures could be in such a toolkit. Yet, we know very little about their impact. This paper takes a step to fill this gap by...

In this paper, we first introduce investment-specific technology (IST) shocks to an otherwise standard international real business cycle model and show that a thoughtful calibration of them along the lines of Raffo (2009) successfully addresses the ""quantity"", ""international comovement"",...

Financial frictions have been identified as key factors affecting economic fluctuations and growth. But, can institutional reforms reduce financial frictions? Based on a canonical investment model, we consider two potential channels: (i) financial transaction costs at the firm level; and (ii)...

This paper studies the cyclical behavior of public spending on health and education in 150 countries during 1987 - 2007. It finds that spending on education and health is procyclical in developing countries and acyclical in developed countries. In addition, education and health expenditures...

This paper applies a disaggregated method for the calculation of the cyclical component of the budget balance for South Africa with an emphasis on the effect of commodity and asset prices, and credit cycle. Results show that the cyclicality of tax revenue is mostly explained by the variations in...

This paper reviews recent analytical and empirical research on the determination of employment, to provide a framework for evaluating the merits of alternative policies to cope with unemployment. Particular emphasis is placed on the mechanisms of employment and wage determination described in...

This paper extends the equilibrium business cycle framework to incorporate ex ante skill heterogeneity among workers. Consistent with the empirical evidence, skilled and unskilled workers in the model face the same degree of cyclical variation in real wages although unskilled workers are subject...

The recent slowdown in the U.S. economy has led to state and local government tax increases and expenditure cuts that have lowered aggregate demand, in contrast to earlier downturns when the sector provided significant automatic stabilizers. Several explanations for this change are examined,...