From its early post-war catch-up phase, Germany's formidable export engine has been its consistent driver of growth. But Germany has almost equally consistently run current account surpluses. Exports have powered the dynamic phases and helped emerge from stagnation. Volatile external demand, in...

Financial repression (legal restrictions on interest rates, credit allocation, capital movements, and other financial operations) was widely used in the past but was largely abandoned in the liberalization wave of the 1990s, as widespread support for interventionist policies gave way to a...

Bolivia's 'Patriotic Agenda 2025' sets targets for social and economic development propelled by state-led industrialization under a five-year development plan (2016-2020). Large-scale public investment has aimed to fill infrastructure gaps and raise productivity to ensure sustained medium-term...

While there is growing evidence of persistent or even permanent output losses from financial crises, the causes remain unclear. One candidate is intangible capital - a rising driver of economic growth that, being non-pledgeable as collateral, is vulnerable to financial frictions. By sheltering...

This paper seeks to quantify the net benefits of a comprehensive reform package aimedat addressing Italy's inter-related challenges. Specifically, it simulates the growth andcompetitiveness effects of a package of fiscal, financial, wage bargaining, and otherstructural reforms. Credible...

This paper describes a new database of major labor and product market reforms covering 26advanced economies over the period 1970-2013. The focus is on large changes in product marketregulation in seven individual network industries, employment protection legislation for regularand temporary...

This paper explores the short-term employment effect of deregulating job protection forregular workers and how it varies with prevailing business cycle conditions. We apply a localprojection method to a newly constructed 'narrative' dataset of major regular job protectionreforms covering 26...

We introduce a new suite of macroeconomic models that extend and complement the Debt, Investment, and Growth (DIG) model widely used at the IMF since 2012. The new DIG-Labor models feature segmented labor markets, efficiency wages and open unemployment, and an informal non-agricultural sector....

This paper is the first attempt to directly explore the long-run nonlinear relationship between theshadow economy and level of development. Using a dataset of 158 countries over the period from1996 to 2015, our results reveal a robust U-shaped relationship between the shadow economy sizeand GDP...

We posit that the relationship between income inequality and economic growth ismediated by the level of equality of opportunity, which we identify with intergenerationalmobility. In economies characterized by intergenerational rigidities, an increase in incomeinequality has persistent...