The paper reviews the case for a strong multilateral response to the global crisis in emerging markets (EMs). It discusses modalities and feasibility of intervention and its associated risks, depending on country circumstances of fiscal space and liquidity needs. The specific role of...

This study provides a set of tools to analyze the monetary and exchange rate policy issues in the seven countries of the Inter-American Development Bank's Caribbean region (The Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago). It then applies some of them to the...

The international business cycle is very important for Latin America's economic performance as the recent global crisis vividly illustrated. This paper investigates how changes in trade linkages between China, Latin America, and the rest of the world have altered the transmission mechanism of...

Capital flows and real estate are pro-cyclical, and real estate has a substantial weight in economies' income and wealth. In this paper, we study the role of real estate markets in the transmission of bank flow shocks to output growth across German cities. The empirical analysis relies on a new...

There is a new and now large literature analyzing government policies for financial stability based on models with endogenous borrowing constraints. These normative analyses build upon the concept of constrained efficient allocation, where the social planner is constrained by the same borrowing...

Measures of economic uncertainty are countercyclical, but economic theory does not provide definite guidance on the direction of causation between uncertainty and the business cycle. This paper proposes a new multi-country approach to the analysis of the interaction between uncertainty and...

This paper considers a modification of the standard Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model of epidemic that allows for different degrees of compulsory as well as voluntary social distancing. It is shown that the fraction of population that self-isolates varies with the perceived probability...

This paper provides estimates of COVID-19 effective reproduction numbers and explains their evolution for selected European countries since the start of the pandemic taking account of changes in voluntary and government mandated social distancing, incentives to comply, vaccination and the...

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...

We estimate a workhorse dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with an occasionally binding borrowing constraint. First, we propose a new specification of the occasionally binding constraint, where the transition between the unconstrained and constrained states is a stochastic...