One view of the equity premium puzzle is that in the standard asset-pricing model with time-separable preferences, the volatility of the stochastic discount factor, for plausible values of risk aversion, is too low to be consistent with consumption and asset return data. We adopt this...

The financial crisis that erupted in 2007 triggered the deepest global recession since the 1930s. In many advanced economies, governments attempted to counter the recession by sizable fiscal stimulus measure. Those measures, and the fall in tax revenues due to the recession, frequently lead to...

This paper analyzes cycles in policy interest rates in 24 advanced economies over 1970–2024, combining a new application of business cycle methodology with rich time-series decompositions of the shocks driving rate movements. “Rate cycles” have gradually evolved over time, with less...

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on debt, puts recent debt developments and prospects in historical context, and analyzes new policy challenges associated with debt resolution. The paper reports three main results. First, even before the pandemic, a rapid...

The world economy has experienced four global recessions over the past seven decades: in 1975, 1982, 1991, and 2009. During each of these episodes, annual real per capita global GDP contracted, and this contraction was accompanied by weakening of other key indicators of global economic activity....

Global growth prospects have deteriorated significantly since the beginning of the year, raising the specter of global recession. This paper relies on insights gleaned from previous global recessions to analyze the recent evolution of economic activity and policies and presents plausible...

Potential output growth around the world slowed over the past two decades. This slowdown is expected to continue in the remainder of the 2020s: global potential growth is projected to average 2.2 percent per year in 2022-30, 0.4 percentage point below its 2011-21 average. Emerging market and...

Across the world, a structural growth slowdown is underway: at current trends, the global potential growth rate—the maximum rate at which an economy can grow without igniting inflation—is expected to fall to a three-decade low over the remainder of the 2020s. The slowdown could be even more...

This paper examines various implications of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs), namely Customs Unions (CUs) and Free Trade Areas (FTAs), in the context of a multi-country general equilibrium model based on comparative advantage considerations. We calibrate the model to represent countries with...

We analyze the evolution and drivers of inflation during the pandemic and the likely trajectory of inflation in the near-term using an event study of inflation around global recessions and a factor-augmented vector auto-regression (FAVAR) model. We report three main results. First, the decline...