December 2008: IMF research summaries on global herding in financial markets (by Marco Cipriani) and on fiscal decentralization (by Lusine Lusinyan); article on the experiences of IMF staff at the Nobel Laureate Meetings in Lindau, Germany (by Chris Crowe); listing of visiting scholars at the IMF during August–December 2008; listing of contents of Vol. 55 No. 4 of IMF Staff Papers; listing of recent IMF Working Papers; listing of recent external publications by IMF staff; and a Call for Papers for an upcoming conference on structural reforms.

Is there a minimum tax to GDP ratio associated with a significant acceleration in the process of growth and development? We give an empirical answer to this question by investigating the existence of a tipping point in tax-to-GDP levels. We use two separate databases: a novel contemporary database covering 139 countries from 1965 to 2011 and a historical database for 30 advanced economies from 1800 to 1980. We find that the answer to the question is yes. Estimated tipping points are similar at about 123⁄4 percent of GDP. For the contemporary dataset we find that a country just above the threshold will have GDP per capita 7.5 percent larger, after 10 years. The effect is tightly estimated and economically large.

An empirical investigation of financial crises during the last 800 years.

IMF Research Perspective (formerly published as IMF Research Bulletin) is a new, redesigned online newsletter covering updates on IMF research. In the inaugural issue of the newsletter, Hites Ahir interviews Valeria Cerra; and they discuss the economic environment 10 years after the global financial crisis. Research Summaries cover the rise of populism; economic reform; labor and technology; big data; and the relationship between happiness and productivity. Sweta C. Saxena was the guest editor for this inaugural issue.

We evaluate and partially challenge the ‘household leverage’ view of the Great Recession. In the data, employment and consumption declined more in states where household debt declined more. We study a model where liquidity constraints amplify the response of consumption and employment to changes in debt. We estimate the model with Bayesian methods combining state and aggregate data. Changes in household credit limits explain 40 percent of the differential rise and fall of employment across states, but a small fraction of the aggregate employment decline in 2008-2010. Nevertheless, since household deleveraging was gradual, credit shocks greatly slowed the recovery.

The Q&A in this issue features seven questions about emerging markets and the financial crisis (by Ayhan Kose); the research summaries are "Tax Revenue Response to the Business Cycle" (by Cemile Sancak, Ricardo Velloso, and Jing Xing) and "Banking Crisis Resolution: Was this Time Different?" (by Luc Laeven and Fabian Valencia). The issue also lists the contents of the second issue of the IMF Economic Review, Volume 58 Number 2; visiting scholars at the IMF during October-December 2010; and recent IMF Working Papers and Staff Position Notes.

This volume presents English, French, and Spanish words, phrases, and names of institutions most commonly encountered in IMF documents.