The right of governments to employ capital controls has always been the official orthodoxy of the International Monetary Fund, and the organization's formal rules providing this right have not changed significantly since the IMF was founded in 1945. But informally, among the staff inside the...

The politics of major banking crises has been transformed since the nineteenth century. Analyzing extensive historical and contemporary evidence, Chwieroth and Walter demonstrate that the rising wealth of the middle class has generated 'great expectations' among voters that the government is...

How much weight should be assigned to a particular factor in explaining an outcome? How should an abstract concept be linked to empirical indicants? These methodological problems—known as the "how much" and "how to" problems, respectively—have raised serious obstacles for ideational...

This paper examines how the staff exercise informal governance over lending decisions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF or Fund). The essential component of designing any IMF program, assessing the extent to which a borrowing country is likely to fulfill its policy commitments, is based...

<title>ABSTRACT</title> A rich literature has emerged on the causes and consequences of international capital mobility (ICM). Yet much of this literature typically depicts ICM as a brute fact - one which possesses an unproblematic logic to which actors respond automatically across time and space. We challenge...

As a result of a long-running internal debate there have been notable incremental changes to how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) treats capital controls, particularly those directed at inflows. These changes combine new acceptance of these policy instruments with an older emphasis on their...