Following four years of relative stability at around $105 per barrel, oil prices have declined sharply since June 2014. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the sources of the recent decline in prices, and examines its macroeconomic, financial and policy implications. The recent drop...

This paper studies the changes in world business cycles during the period 1960-2003. We employ a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model to estimate common and country-specific components in the main macroeconomic aggregates (output, consumption, and investment) of the G-7 countries. We then...

Economic theory has identified a number of channels through which openness to international financial flows could raise productivity growth. However, while there is a vast empirical literature analyzing the impact of financial openness on output growth, far less attention has been paid to its...

The financial crisis has re-ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its implications for growth, especially for developing countries. The empirical literature has not been able to conclusively establish the presumed growth benefits of financial integration....

This paper provides a brief analysis of three major questions raised in the context of the recent global financial crisis. First, how similar is the crisis to previous episodes? We argue that the crisis featured some close similarities to earlier ones, including the presence of credit and asset...

This paper examines the dynamic implications of the use of an endogenous discount factor in small open economy models. We first present a stochastic dynamic model of a small open economy with an endogenous discount factor. Then, we examine the same model with a fixed discount factor. We...