This paper examines housing finance and housing price dynamics in selected emerging Middle Eastern economies over the past two decades. It finds that (i) mortgage markets have experienced rapid development, which has led to lower private per capita consumer spending volatility this decade; (ii) a...

Employing a dynamic panel regression, this study estimates the medium-term current account position for three subgroups of emerging market and developing countries with shared economic characteristics. The fundamental determinants of the macroeconomic balance approach to current account...

Commodity prices have declined sharply over the past three years, and output growth has slowed considerably among countries that are net exporters of commodities. A critical question for policy makers in these economies is whether commodity windfalls influence potential output. Our analysis...

This paper estimates public sector service efficiency in England at the sub-regional level, studying changes post crisis during the large fiscal consolidation effort. It finds that despite the overall spending cut (and some caveats owing to data availability), efficiency broadly improved across...

We build and estimate open economy two-bloc DSGE models to study the transmission and impact of shocks in Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. After accounting for country-specific fiscal and monetary sectors, we estimate their key policy and structural parameters. Our findings suggest...

We carry out an ex post assessment of popular models used to forecast oil prices and propose a host of alternative VAR models based on traditional global macroeconomic and oil market aggregates. While the exact specification of VAR models for nominal oil price prediction is still open to debate,...

This paper presents and estimates a small open economy dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model (DSGE) for the Jordanian economy. The model features nominal and real rigidities, imperfect competition and habit formation in the consumer’s utility function. Oil imports are explicitly modeled...