Banks do not charge explicit fees for many of the services they provide but the service payment is bundled with the offered interest rates. This output therefore has to be imputed using estimates of the opportunity cost of funds. We argue that rather than using the single short-term, low-risk...

This survey of business cycle synchronization in the European monetary union focuses on two issues: have business cycles become more similar, and which factors drive business cycle synchronization. We conclude that business cycles in the euro area have gone through periods of both convergence...

Misallocation of resources across firms leads to lower aggregate productivity. In this paper, we provide new estimates of manufacturing productivity differences across countries and establish by how much they would be reduced if such misallocation were eliminated. Using World Bank survey data...

We show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities (PPPs) with a closely-matched set of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing countries. Our results are close to those reported by the International Comparisons Program...