This paper presents the first assessment domestic market integration in Brazil using the law of one price. The law of one price is tested using two panel unit root methodologies and a unique data set comprising price indices for 51 products across 11 metro-areas. We find that the law of one...

Global financial conditions are poised to tighten further as the global recovery proceeds. While monetary policy normalization should be a healthy global development as growth continues to recover in advanced economies, financial spillovers seen during the taper episode-which started with the...

Against the backdrop of an ongoing review of the inflation-targeting framework, this paper examines the real-time inflation forecasts of the Bank of Canada with the aim of identifying potential areas for improvement. Not surprisingly, the results show that errors in forecasting non-core...

We develop a simple approach to identify economic news and monetary shocks at a high frequency. The approach is used to examine financial market developments in the United States following the Federal Reserve's May 22, 2013 taper talk suggesting that it would begin winding down its quantitative...

While Brazil's deep recession has been broad based, it has been marked by a particularlylarge fall in investment. Real investment fell by around 30 percent between the beginningof 2014 and the beginning of 2017. This paper finds that a variety of factors contributed tothe investment decline,...

This paper outlines a simple approach for incorporating extraneous predictions into structural models. The method allows the forecaster to combine predictions derived from any source in a way that is consistent with the underlying structure of the model. The method is flexible enough that...

Notwithstanding persistently-high unemployment following the Great Recession, inflation in the United States has been remarkably stable. We find that a traditional Phillips curve describes the behavior of inflation reasonably well since the 1960s. Using a non-linear Kalman filter that allows for...

Inadequate infrastructure has been widely viewed as a principal barrier to growth and development in Latin America and the Caribbean. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of infrastructure in the region and highlights key areas in which infrastructure networks can be enhanced. The public...