Inflationary pressures have heightened in the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) since 2003. This paper studies determinants of inflation in GCC, using an empirical model that includes domestic and external factors. Inflation in major trading partners appears to be the most relevant foreign...

The paper aims at characterizing the main determinants of the medium-term current account balance for oil-exporting countries using dynamic panel estimation techniques. Previous studies included a very limited number of oil-exporting countries in their samples, raising concerns about the...

Across a sample of thirty four emerging countries, the evidence shows the frequent existence of a pro-cyclical fiscal impulse. However, the scope for countercyclical policy increases with the availability of international reserves as it enhances credibility and mitigates concerns about the...

While inflation differentials in a monetary union can be benign, reflecting a catch-up process, or an adjustment mechanism to asymmetric shocks or different business cycles, they may also indicate distortions related to inefficiencies in domestic product and labor markets that amplify or make...

Extending recent theoretical contributions on sources of inflation inertia, we argue that monetary uncertainty accounts for sluggish expectations adjustment to nominal disturbances. Estimating a model in which rational individuals learn over time about shifts in U.S. monetary policy and the...

An increasing body of evidence suggests that the behavior of the economy has changed in many fundamental ways over the last decades. In particular, greater financial deregulation, larger wealth accumulation, and better policies might have helped lower uncertainty about future income and lengthen...

The recent financial crisis raises important issues about the transmission of financial shocks across borders. In this paper, a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model is constructed to assess the relevance of international spillovers following a historical slowdown in U.S. equity prices. The...

Using unobserved stochastic components and Kalman filter techniques, the paper assesses the relative importance of transitory and permanent shifts in Italian real GDP within a production function framework. Evidence suggests that the increase in hours worked that has accompanied pension and...

The ongoing financial turmoil has triggered a lively debate on ways of containing systemic risk and lessening the likelihood of boom-and-bust episodes in credit markets. Particularly, it has been argued that banking regulation might attenuate procyclicality in lending standards by affecting the...

This paper proposes a markedly different transmission mechanism from monetary policy to the macroeconomy, focusing on how policy changes nominal inertia in the Phillips curve. Using recent theoretical developments, we examine the properties of a small, estimated U.S. monetary model...