Economists around the world rely in addition to official statistics on business (and consumer) surveys, which are more up-to-date. However, for many emerging and developing countries there is a lack of such surveys. This gap can, at least partly, be filled by the Ifo World Economic Survey (WES)....

Interest-rate spreads fluctuate widely across time and countries. We characterize their behavior using some 3,200 quarterly observations for 21 advanced and 17 emerging economies since the early 1990s. Before the financial crisis, spreads are 10 times more volatile in emerging economies than in...

Using data for a large number of advanced and emerging market economies during 1982-2009, this paper examines the distinct impact of financial integration and globalization on several dimensions of real activity. We find that: (a) financial integration has progressed significantly worldwide,...

This paper explores the link between monetary policies of large industrial countries and international credit cycles. Based on an overinvestment framework, we show that in the prevailing asymmetric world monetary system, monetary policies of large centre countries can fuel credit booms in...

In this paper, we examine the role of global and domestic credit supply shocks in macroeconomic fluctuations for Emerging Markets. For this purpose, we impose a set of zero and sign restrictions within a medium-scale Bayesian Vector Auto-Regressive model. Quarterly data from South Africa and G-7...

In this paper we characterize empirically the comovements of macro variables typically observed in middle income countries, as well as the boom-bust cycle that has been observed during the last two decades. We find that many countries that have liberalized their financial markets, have witnessed...

This paper develops a threshold-augmented dynamic multi-country model (TG-VAR) to quantify the macroeconomic effects of Covid-19. We show that there exist threshold effects in the relationship between output growth and excess global volatility at individual country levels in a significant...

This paper investigates the cyclicality of international reserves and their role in macroeconomic stabilization. We challenge two widely held assumptions: (1) central banks typically manage IR counter-cyclically—accumulating reserves during booms and drawing them down during downturns; and (2)...

Even before the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis and ongoing European debt crisis, much attention has been given to the re-emergence of the Asian giants, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and India. Both countries have attained unprecedented growth and economic development-PRC and...

We study the responsiveness of small and medium-sized firms to a small-business corporate income tax schedule using population-wide administrative data from South Africa. We find sizeable bunching of firms at the corporate income thresholds where the corporate tax rate increases, implying active...