This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the strength of the Fisher effect which predicts a positive relationship between the nominal interest rate and inflation in the postwar period in the five major industrial countries, utilizing recently developed time series techniques. The results...

The CFA franc zone comprises a group of countries in central and west Africa whose currencies have been firmly linked to the French franc since 1948. It combines the features of a currency union with those of an exchange rate peg, and an analysis of its effectiveness must examine both...

The household saving ratio in France has undergone very sharp changes over the past two decades, falling dramatically in the first part of the 1980s before rising in more recent years. This paper emphasizes two factors in the evolution of private saving in France. The first relates to...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

An aggregate production function is estimated with recent cointegrating techniques that are particularly appropriate for estimating long-run relationships. The empirical results suggest that the growth of output in France has been spurred by increased trade integration within the European...

This paper investigates empirically the pass-through of money market interest rates to retail banking interest rates in Chile, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and five European countries. Overall, Chile''s pass-through does not appear atypical. Based on a standard...

This paper proposes an ex ante evaluation of the effects of new labor contracts such as the ""Contrat Nouvelle Embauche"" (CNE) introduced in France in 2005. The lessons we draw are of sufficiently general interest to be applicable to other countries or reforms of employment protection laws....

Total factor productivity (TFP) of 14 manufacturing sectors in France has kept up with that of the United States during 1980-2002 and remained well above that of the United Kingdom. Estimates using a dynamic panel equilibrium correction model indicate that sectors further behind the...

In this paper, a simple methodology to assess the effectiveness of automatic stabilizers is proposed and empirically tested using French data for the period 1970-2000. The paper concludes that fiscal stabilizers have dampened output variability by approximately 35 45 percent depending on the...

This paper aims to measure the risk premium on French equities during 1960-92 and to evaluate how well theoretical models based on various representations of agents'' preferences can explain it. Aside from the standard, time-additive utility function with constant relative risk aversion, three...