Austria has probably the world’s highest pension expenditures relative to its economic size, largely because of the generosity of its pension system. This paper examines the institutional setup of the Austrian pension system and projects its future development based on current policies. The...

This paper analyzes the empirical determinants of household saving using data from 21 OECD countries for 1975-95. A particular focus is the influence of the tax and social security systems on household saving. The paper therefore extends the usual set of explanatory variables used to explain...

This paper examines empirical determinants of private saving for a sample of economies in Southeast Asia and Latin America over the period 1975–95. It uses panel estimations to establish relationships between private saving rates and a range of policy and nonpolicy variables. The findings show...

This paper investigates the transmission of monetary policy by private banks in Brazil during the recent easing cycle. The analysis presented uses a panel dataset with information on lending by private banks in Brazil and concludes that monetary transmission through lending volumes was not...

This paper presents a model to determine the tax effort and tax capacity of 113 countries and the main variables on which they depend. The results and the model allow a clear determination of which countries are near their tax capacity and which are some way from it, and therefore, could...

The financial crisis in the advanced countries that began in 2007 has led central bankers to adopt unconventional policy measures as policy interest rates neared the zero bound. One suggestion (Blanchard, Dell’Ariccia, and Mauro, 2010) has been to raise inflation targets to provide more...

This paper examines publicly listed Chilean firms’ performance during the 2008–09 crisis. In particular, it studies the effects from changes in external financing conditions, aggregate demand, and international trade on firms’ investment, sales, and profits, using...

The sizeable fiscal consolidation required to stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratios in several countries in the aftermath of the global crisis raises a crucial question on its feasibility. To answer this question, we rely on historical evidence from a sample of 91 adjustment episodes of countries...

To date, an operational measure of systemic risk capturing non-linear tail comovement between system-wide and individual bank returns has not yet been developed. This paper proposes an extension of the so-called CoVaR measure that captures the asymmetric response of the banking system to...

This paper investigates the determinants of bank funding costs for a sample of internationally active banks from 2001–12. We find that changes in banks’ unsecured funding costs are associated with bank-specific characteristics such as an institution’s credit worthiness and...