The U.S. labor force participation rate (LFPR) fell dramatically following the Great Recession and has yet to start recovering. A key question is how much of the post-2007 decline is reversible, something which is central to the policy debate. The key finding of this paper is that while around...

This paper examines the roles of U.S. financial innovation, financial globalization, and the savings glut hypothesis in explaining the rise in U.S. external debt, first in a portfolio balance model, and then empirically. Perhaps surprisingly, financial deepening and falling home bias in...

To understand better Canada''s smooth reallocation of labor in response to the recent commodity price boom, but seemingly poor productivity performance, this paper examines job and firm dynamics in Canada relative to the United States. Overall, it finds that while Canada''s labor market...

This paper aims to improve the understanding of U.S. inflation dynamics by separating out structural from cyclical effects using frequency domain techniques. Most empirical studies of inflation dynamics do not distinguish between secular and cyclical movements, and we show that such a...

This paper sheds light on the attractiveness of U.S. assets by studying dollar risk premiums, calculated using Consensus exchange rate forecasts, and linking them to bilateral capital flows. The paper finds that the presence of negative dollar risk premiums (i.e. expectations of a dollar...

This paper assesses how pro-poor and inclusive Asia’s recent growth has been, and what factors have been driving these outcomes. It finds that while poverty has fallen across the region over the last two decades, inequality has increased, dampening the impact of growth on poverty reduction. As...