All types of recessions, on average, not just those associated with financial and political crises (as in Cerra and Saxena, AER 2008), lead to permanent output losses. These findings have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. A new paradigm of the business cycle needs to account for...

This paper presents new high-frequency data on trade policy changes targeting medical and food products since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, documenting how countries used trade policy instruments in response to the health crisis on a week-by-week basis. The data set reveals a rapid...

This paper assesses how regional trade agreements (RTAs) impact growth volatility on a worldwide sample of 170 countries with data spanning the period 1978-2012.Notwithstanding concerns that trade openness through RTAs can heighten exposure to shocks, in particular when it leads to increased...

The Flexible System of Global Models (FSGM) is a group of models developed by the Economic Modeling Division of the IMF for policy analysis. A typical module of FSGM is a multi-region, forward-looking semi-structural global model consisting of 24 regions. Using the three core modules focused on...

We introduce a new comprehensive announcement-level database tracking the extraordinary fiscal, monetary, prudential, and other policies that countries adopted in response to Covid-19. The database provides detailed information, including sizes where available, for 28 granular policies adopted...

The Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal model (GIMF) is a multi-region DSGE model developed by the Economic Modeling Division of the IMF for policy and scenario analysis. This paper compares two versions of GIMF, GIMF with a conventional financial accelerator, where bank balance sheets do not...