The paper explores whether and how current lending-of-last-resort can be extended beyond national borders. It argues that what makes lending of last resort effective at the national level is a blend of resource availability, technical discretion, ex-ante supervision, and powers of enforcement....

This paper provides an assessment of Italian aid policy during the period 1983-2006. In comparison with other donors (DAC and G-7), the main stylized facts are: persistently lower aid/GDP ratio, greater recourse to multilateral channels, a higher percentage of �tied� flows and...

Statistical measurement of Italy�s international investment position is subject to considerable uncertainty, owing essentially to the presence of errors and omissions in the balance of payments. The entries under this item became very substantial at the start of the 1990s, coinciding with...

Policy evaluation based on the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with aggregate macroeconomic time series rests on the assumption that a representative agent can be identified, whose behavioural parameters are independent of the policy rules. Building on earlier work by...

We use data for 143 developing countries during the period 1980-2004 to study empirically the relationship between multilateral aid (as proxied by IDA flows) and support for US foreign policy, as measured by voting alignment at the United Nations General Assembly. Our identifica�tion...

This work attempts to quantify the size of the adjustment of the United States external imbalance which can arise from a depreciation of the dollar, an adjustment of the Government�s budget in the United States and an acceleration of the technological process in other main advanced...

This paper studies the transmission of monetary policy shocks from the US to the euro-area using a two-country structural VAR with no exogeneity assumption. The analysis reveals the following results. First, in response to an unexpected increase in the Federal funds rate, the euro immediately...

The paper analyzes the role of the banking system in the international transmission of financial shocks. A channel of transmission is defined as a mechanism through which a financial crisis in one country brings about a financial crisis in another country. Channels involving the banking sector...

The aim of this paper is to design the optimal institutional arrangement for a monetary union. Using a two-country rational expectations model, the study analyses how the conservatism of the area-wide central bank and the penalty system for fiscal deviation (Stability and Growth Pact) should be...

This paper argues that the lack of timely and decisive policy action to correct domestic and external imbalances contributed crucially to the build-up of financial excesses that led to the financial crisis and the Great Recession. We focus on 2002-07 and perform a number of counterfactual...