Introduction

News

Advance Online Publication (AOP)

IMF Staff Papers is now utilising our industry leading Advance Online Publication (AOP) service. This service enables us to publish online the final version of a paper, fully citeable and exactly as it will be published in the printed edition. In some instances papers are published AOP a significant number of months before appearing in print.
View Advance Online Publication.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Jacques Polak Ninth Annual Research Conference
13-14 November 2008

The International Monetary Fund will hold the Jacques Polak Ninth Annual Research Conference at its headquarters in Washington, DC, on 13-14 November 2008. The conference is intended to provide a forum for discussing innovative research in economics, undertaken both by IMF staff and by outside economists, and to facilitate the exchange of views among researchers and policy makers. Professor Jean Tirole will deliver the Mundell-Fleming lecture. Interested contributors should submit proposals by 29 June 2008 (e-mail to ARC2008@imf.org).

Volume 55, Issue 1 of IMF Staff Papers is now published.

In this issue, a team of economists look at approaches to modeling the use of IMF resources in order to gauge whether the recent decline in credit outstanding is a temporary or permanent phenomenon. Era Dabla-Norris and Gabriela Inchauste examine what drives the growth of firms, with a focus on informality and regulations. Evan Tanner and Issouf Samake use a vector autoregression approach to examine the probabilistic sustainability of public debt in Brazil. Mexico, and Turkey. And Rachel Glennerster and Yongseok Shin ask whether transparency pays—that is, does the frequency and accuracy of macroeconomic information released to the public lead to lower borrowing costs in sovereign debt markets?