Home page - Mariarosaria Comunale
Economist in the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund (since September 2021) * My profile: Research at the IMF: Mariarosaria Comunale
My research interests: Open Economy Macroeconomics, Applied Econometrics (Panel data, Bayesian methods), International Finance, Monetary Policy, International Economics, Gender equality, EU Integration, and Innovation/AI.
Twitter account @Mariosa_Com
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Comunale and Manera (2024) "The Economic Impacts and the Regulation of AI: A Review of the Academic Literature and Policy Actions ", IMF Working Paper No. 2024/65.
Berg, Buffie, Comunale, Papageorgiou, and Zanna (2024) "Searching for Wage Growth: Policy Responses to the “New Machine Age”", IMF Working Paper No. 2024/03.
Akbal, Akepanidtaworn, Cabezon, Comunale, Conesa Martinez, and Unsal (2023) "Monetary Policy Frameworks and Communication in the Caucasus and Central Asia", IMF Working Paper No. 2023/251.
Comunale and Nguyen (2023) “A Comprehensive MacroEconomic Uncertainty Measure for the Euro Area and its Implications to COVID-19”, IMF Working Paper No. 2023/229. [Data available at this link]
Akbal, Comunale, Conesa, Papageorgiou, Unsal (2023): "Fiscal Imprudence and Inflation Expectations: The Role of Monetary Policy Frameworks" October 2023 World Economic Outlook—Analytical Chapter 2, Box 2.2., International Monetary Fund.
Comunale, de Bruxelles, Kochhar, Rastauskas, Unsal (2023): Who are Central Banks? Gender, Human Resources, and Central Banking, IMF Working Paper No. 2023/091.
Comunale, de Bruxelles, Unsal (2023): Women Struggle for Equal Pay and Progression at Central Banks (imf.org), IMFBlogs, Chart of the Week, May 2023.
Database
IMF Monetary Policy Frameworks database (IAPOC toolkit) - based on Unsal et al. (2022)
Podcast
08.03.2024 - Why gender equality in financial institutions is macro-critical
Monique Newiak, deputy unit chief, inclusion and gender, and Mariarosaria Comunale, economist at the International Monetary Fund, join Arunima Sharan, senior research analyst at OMFIF’s Economic and Monetary Policy Institute, to discuss the state of gender balance in financial institutions. They examine the IMF’s gender strategy, the macro-criticality of gender equality and findings from their recent publication, ‘Who are Central Banks? Gender, Human Resources, and Central Banking‘.
Link: Why gender equality in financial institutions is macro-critical - OMFIF
Publications
A panel VAR analysis of macro-financial imbalances in the EU
We investigate the interactions across current account misalignments, real effective exchange rate misalignments and financial gaps within EU countries, applying an heterogeneous Bayesian panel VAR to 27 EU members over the period 1994–2012. We find that, in non-euro area countries and euro periphery an increase in current account misalignments leads to a temporary increase in the real effective exchange rate misalignments, lowering competitiveness and thus amplifying current account fluctuations. For the core, increase in the rate or an expansion of the financial gap may help rebalancing the current account. In the central eastern European members, an increase in the real effective exchange rate misalignments may bring larger current account deficits in the medium-long run.
Author: Mariarosaria Comunale
Journal of International Money and Finance, Volume 121, March 2022.
An empirical investigation of the relationship between trade and structural change
This paper investigates the role of international trade in explaining the decrease of the tradable sector employment share. We use an unbalanced panel of advanced and emerging economies for the period 1960–2011 from the EU-KLEMS and GGDC 10-sector databases in an Error Correction Model analysis. We show that international trade directly contributes to structural change: imports are negatively related with employment shifts to tradable sectors in particular in the long-run. By contrast, exports and shifts of employment towards tradables are positively associated. When trade is split in intermediate and final goods, we show that in the long-run the negative elasticity of structural change to import is driven by imports of intermediate goods, while the positive sign of exports is driven by exports of final goods.
Authors: Mariarosaria Comunale and Giulia Felice
International Economics, Volume 171, October 2022.
Business cycles in the EU: a comprehensive comparison across methods
In this paper, we investigate different methods of assessing business cycles for the European Union. First, we conduct a Monte Carlo experiment using a broad spectrum of univariate trend-cycle decomposition methods. Second, we estimate the business cycles for real GDP and unemployment data from 1995 to end 2020. We found that the suite of models consisting of popular Hodrick-Prescott, Christiano-Fitzgerald and structural trend-cycle-seasonal filters are the best choice in both simulations and the real applications. Our analysis also confirms that the countries’ business cycles are synchronized with the aggregate euro area. Some differences can be found in the case of periphery and new member states, with the latter improving in terms of coherency after the global financial crisis. The German cycles are among the cyclical movements least synchronized with the aggregate euro area.
Author: Mariarosaria Comunale and Dima Celov
Business Cycles in the EU: A Comprehensive Comparison Across Methods | Emerald Insight, Essays in Honour of Fabio Canova (Advances in Econometrics, Vol. 44B), Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 99-146.
*The views expressed herein are mine and should not be attributed to the IMF, its Executive Board, or its management. They do not necessarily represent the official views of the Bank of Lithuania, the ECB or the ESCB either.