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The research summaries in the March 2012 issue of the IMF Research Bulletin are "Foreign Direct Investment and the Crisis: Is This Time Different?" (by Yuko Kinoshita) and "Food Prices and Inflation" (by James P. Walsh). The Q&A covers seven questions on "Unemployment through the Prism of the Great Recession" (by Prakash Loungani). This issue also launches a new feature "Conversations with Visiting Scholars" with an interview with Tom Sargent, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Also included in this issue are details on visiting scholars at the IMF, a listing of recently published IMF Working Papers, and information on the next issue of "IMF Economic Review."
We analyze the causes of the apparent bias towards optimism in growth forecasts underpinning the design of IMF-supported programs, which has been documented in the literature. We find that financial variables observable to forecasters are strong predictors of growth forecast errors. The greater the expansion of the credit-to-GDP gap in the years preceding a program, the greater its over-optimism about growth over the next two years. This result is strongest among forecasts that were most optimistic, where errors are also increasing in the economy’s degree of liability dollarization. We find that the inefficient use of financial information applies to growth forecasts more broadly, including the IMF’s forecasts in the World Economic Outlook and those produced by professional forecasters compiled by Consensus Economics. We conclude that improved macrofinancial analysis represents a promising avenue for reducing over-optimism in growth forecasts.
A textbook with innovative real-world macroeconomic analyses of timely policy issues, with case studies and examples from more than fifty countries. This timely and refreshingly real–world focused textbook examines some of the world's most critical policy issues through a macroeconomics lens. After presenting analytical foundations, modeling tools, and theoretical perspectives, Economics of Global Business goes a step further than most other texts, with a practical look at the local and multinational tradeoffs facing economic policymakers in more than fifty countries. Topics range from income equality and the financial crisis to GDP, inflation and unemployment, and, notably, one of the fir...
Using a novel approach involving natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, we construct a new cross-country index of firms' inflation expectations from earnings call transcripts. Our index has a high correlation with existing survey-based measures of firms' inflation expectations, it is robust to external validation tests and is built using a new method that outperforms other NLP algorithms. In an application of our index to United States, we uncover some facts related to firm's inflation expectations. We show that higher expected inflation translates into future inflation. Going into the firms level dimension of our index, we show departures from a rational framework in firms' inflation expectations and that firms' attention to the central enhances monetary policy effectiveness.
'The Gap-Year Guidebook 2013' has comprehensive advice on travelling, volunteering, working round the world, languages, sports courses, office skills, career breaks and life after the gap year.
Using financial statement data from the Thomson Reuter’s Worldscope database for 22,333 non-financial firms in 52 advanced and emerging economies, this paper examines how fiscal stimulus (i.e., changes in structural deficit) interacted with sectoral business cycle sensitivity affected corporate profitability during the recovery period of the global financial crisis (GFC). Using cross-sectional analyses, our findings indicate that corporate profitability improved significantly after the GFC fiscal stimulus, especially in manufacturing, utilities and retail sectors. Firm size and leverage are also found to be significant in explaining changes in corporate profitability.
This book analyses the IMF's role as arbiter of legitimate economic policy since the 2008 crash, and during aftershocks of the Eurozone crisis.
The lingering effects of the economic crisis are still visible—this shows a clear need to improve our understanding of financial crises. This book surveys a wide range of crises, including banking, balance of payments, and sovereign debt crises. It begins with an overview of the various types of crises and introduces a comprehensive database of crises. Broad lessons on crisis prevention and management, as well as the short-term economic effects of crises, recessions, and recoveries, are discussed.
This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth and job creation in developing economies with a focus on low and lower middle-income countries along two dimensions: growth patterns and short-run correlations. Analysis on growth patterns shows that regime changes are quite common in both economic growth and employment growth, yet they are not synchronized with each other. Okun’s Law—the short-run relationship between output and labor market—holds in half of the countries in our sample and shows considerable cross-country heterogeneity.