In most macroeconomic models, the substitutability between domestic and foreign goods is calibrated using aggregated data. This imposes homogeneous elasticities across goods, and the calibration is only valid under this assumption. If elasticities are heterogeneous, the aggregate...

The recent financial crisis raises important issues about the transmission of financial shocks across borders. In this paper, a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model is constructed to assess the relevance of international spillovers following a historical slowdown in U.S. equity prices. The...

The global financial crisis has reopened the debate on the potential spillover effects from the financial sector to the real economy. This paper adds to that debate by providing new evidence on the link between finance and firm-level productivity, focusing on the case of Estonia. We contribute...

An analysis of current and forecasted Mexican meat consumption and imports is presented at the table cut level of disaggregation. Unlike previous studies, this study uses adult equivalence scales, a price imputation approach, a consistent censored demand system, and estimation techniques from...

This is the poster presentation. Please refer to the full paper for details.

This Selected Issues paper focuses on financing constraints and productivity in Estonia. The paper examines two questions: (1) is there evidence of financing constraints among Estonian firms; and (2) have financing constraints reduced firm-level total factor productivity (TFP)? These questions...

We analyze the performance of kernel density methods applied to grouped data to estimate poverty (as applied in Sala-i-Martin, 2006, QJE). Using Monte Carlo simulations and household surveys, we find that the technique gives rise to biases in poverty estimates, the sign and magnitude of which...

We examine the interest rate elasticity of housing prices, advancingthe empirical literature in two directions. First, we take a commonly used cross-country panel dataset and evaluate the housing price equation using a consistent estimator in the presence of endogenous explanatory variables and...

In a recent paper, Bai and Perron (2006) demonstrate that their approach for testing for multiple structural breaks in time series works well in large samples, but they found substantial deviations in both the size and power of their tests in smaller samples. We propose modifying their...