We use household-level data from the Household Budgetary Survey to study the saving patterns of Maltese households. We first establish a set of key observations from the data, showing that the likelihood of saving rises with income, age and education. We then estimate a Logit model of the...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that US industrial firms invest heavily in noncash, risky financial assets. Using hand-collected data on financial portfolios of German firms, we show that risky asset holdings are not an anomaly unique to the US. We find that industrial firms in Germany invest...

This research sheds light on the causal link between commodity price indexes, i.e., the Agricultural Raw Materials Price Index, Industry Input Price Index, Metal Price Index, and Energy Price Index, in the global market, using wavelet coherence, Toda-Yamamoto causality, and gradual shift...

Over the past decades, inequality has risen not just in advanced economies but also in many emerging market and developing economies, becoming one of the key global policy challenges. And throughout the 20th century, Latin America was associated with some of the world's highest levels of...

This guidance note describes how to use the Excel-based template developed by the Fiscal Affairs Department (FAD) of the IMF accompanying the note 'How to Design a Fiscal Strategy in a Resource-Rich Country.' This template uses data inputs to generate simulations of fiscal policy dynamics. It...