This Selected Issues Paper on Iran reviews that monetary factors are the main determinants of inflation in the country. Government spending out of oil revenues leads to large liquidity injections that the central bank accommodates owing to its efforts to prevent a significant nominal...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the empirical relationship between corporate leverage—and other indicators of financial health—and investment in Israel, using dynamic panel data techniques. The results suggest that weak balance sheets may well have contributed to the investment...

The 2008 crisis underscored the interconnectedness of the international business cycle, with U.S. shocks leading to the largest global slowdown since the 1930s. We estimate spillover effects across major advanced country regions in a structural VAR (SVAR) using pre-crisis data. Our new method...

Pakistan undertook major financial sector reforms starting in the late 1980s. The effects of these reforms on the profitability and cost and revenue efficiency of the banking sector are evaluated. The revenue performance of all banks, and especially the privatized banks, improved significantly,...

This Selected Issues paper on the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) underlies key features of business cycles. To obtain new measures of classical and growth cycles, simple rules were applied to date turning points in the classical business cycle, and a recently developed frequency domain...

This paper documents the phenomenon of underpricing initial public offerings (IPOs) for 47 firms that went public between 2001 and 2006 in the equity markets of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The average initial abnormal returns of 290 percent exceed those found in the...

A growing literature establishes that high quality early childhood interventions targeted toward disadvantaged children have substantial impacts on later life outcomes. Little is known about the mechanisms producing these impacts. This paper uses longitudinal data on cognitive and personality...

Despite the external origin of the financial crisis, the potential impact on India’s corporate sector could be large, as India has become increasingly integrated with the global economy in the past decade. The Selected Issues paper discusses India’s economic development and...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes external shocks and business cycle fluctuations in Mexico. The paper examines the relative importance of U.S. demand shocks—and other foreign disturbances—in explaining Mexican output fluctuations. It identifies the dynamic response of...

A growing literature establishes that high quality early childhood interventions targeted toward disadvantaged children have substantial impacts on later life outcomes. Little is known about the mechanisms producing these impacts. This paper uses longitudinal data on cognitive and personality...