The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting...

The Bank of Canada is one of very few central banks that has made records of the intraday timing of its intervention operations available to researchers. The authors investigate the effectiveness of sterilized intervention in the Canadian dollar exchange rate market over the period January 1995...

An important issue in the debate over the desirability of freer capital mobility for developing countries is whether capital flows have significant effects on economic growth. Proponents of capital account liberalization cite the growth-promoting attributes of capital inflows as a key benefit of...

This paper assesses the effectiveness and associated externalities that arise when macroprudential policies (MPPs) are used to manage international capital flows. Using a sample of up to 139 countries, we examine the impact of eight different MPP measures on cross-border bank flows over the...

We propose a novel theory of financial contagion. We study global coordination games of regime change in two regions with an initially uncertain correlation of regional fundamentals. A crisis in region 1 is a wake-up call to investors in region 2 that induces a reassessment of local...

In theory, nominal exchange rate movements can lead to “expenditure switching” when they generate changes in the relative prices of goods across countries. This paper explores whether the expenditure-switching role of exchange rates has changed in the current episode of significant global...

The governance challenges facing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are not simply limited to representation and voice, and the associated question of quota allocation. The author identifies governance issues that hitherto remained largely ignored by the literature and policy-makers alike....

The author develops and estimates a quantitative dynamic-optimizing model of a small open economy (SOE) with domestic and import price stickiness and capital-adjustment costs. A monetary policy rule allows the central bank to systematically manage the short-term nominal interest rate in response...

Several empirical studies suggest that exchange rate pass-through has declined in recent years in industrialized countries. Results for Canada also indicate that, in the 1990s, import and consumer prices became less responsive to exchange rate movements. These findings are based on reducedform...

Inflation-targeting central banks around the world often state their inflation objectives with regard to the consumer price index (CPI). Yet the literature on optimal monetary policy based on models with nominal rigidities and more than one sector suggests that CPI inflation is not always the...