Event studies are used to analyze the impact of U.S. financial, fiscal, and monetary policies from US to foreign asset prices across a range of G20 countries and Switzerland. The initial announcement that the Administration supported tighter regulation of banks led to a generalized fall in...

This volume, by Bijan B. Aghevli, Tamim Bayoumi, and Guy Meredith, is based on a seminar on structural change in Japan held in early 1997 and chaired by the IMF's First Deputy Managing Director, Stanley Fischer. Discussion of teh day-to-day management of the standard levers of fiscal and...

VARs of real growth since 1970 are used to estimate spillovers between the U.S., euro area, Japan, and an aggregate of small industrial countries, which proxies for global shocks. U.S. and global shocks generate significant spillovers, while those from the euro area and Japan are small. This...

This paper describes potential benefits from Canada''s expanding oil sands production, higher energy exports, and further improvements in the terms of trade. Contrary to the previous Canadian exchange rate literature, this paper finds that both energy and nonenergy commodity prices have an...

Trends in the size of U.S. government are examined. In the postwar period, general government primary spending rose by 1⁄4 percent of GDP a year through 1975, stabilizing thereafter. With higher social transfers offset by a lower burden of defense spending, expansion reflected a baby-boom...

This paper uses bilateral data on 420 merchandise trade flows between 21 industrial countries are used to estimate standard trade equations. The data set of over 11,000 observations allows the underlying elasticities to be estimated with considerable precision. Remarkably, a single specification...

This paper uses vector autoregressions to examine the monetary transmission mechanism in Japan. The empirical results indicate that both monetary policy and banks’ balance sheets are important sources of shocks, that banks play a crucial role in transmitting monetary shocks to economic...

What caused Asia's largest economy, once the envy of the world, to lag behind many of the other industrial countries? And why did it take so long for Japan to recover from the bursting of its asset price bubble of the late 1980s? In this volume, a team from the International Monetary Fund...

This paper examines linkages across North America by estimating the size of spillovers from the major regions of the world-the United States, euro area, Japan, and the rest of the world-to Canada and Mexico, and decomposing the impact of these spillovers into trade, commodity price, and...

This paper analyzes the welfare benefits from falling relative prices of IT (information technology) goods across a wide range of countries. We find, using two separate methodologies and datasets, that welfare benefits mainly accrue to users of IT, not their producers, because of falling...