Cross-country differences in economic resilience-in an economy's ability to withstand and adjust to shocks-remain significant in the euro area. In part, the differences reflect the lack of a national nominal exchange rate as a mechanism to adjust to shocks. The IMF staff has argued that...

Conventional wisdom states that the statutory split of payroll taxation between firms and workers is of no macroeconomic relevance, because the tax incidence is fully determined by the market structure. This paper breaks with this view by establishing a theoretical link between the statutory...

This paper examines magnitudes and business cycle dynamics of social security contributions (SSC). In most OECD countries studied, we document a negative covariation of payroll tax burdens with GDP and GDP growth at business cycle and lower frequencies. We assess the overall magnitude of the...

We study the properties of the IMF-WEO estimates of real-time output gaps for countries in the euro area as well as the determinants of their revisions over 1994-2017. The analysis shows that staff typically saw economies as operating below their potential. In real time, output gaps tend to have...