Fundamental changes in institutions during the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy present a formidable challenge to monetary policy decision makers. For the case of China, we examine the institutional changes in the monetary system during the process of transition and...

This paper examines two related issues: (a) the implicit methodology used by the U.S. Treasury in determining whether China and its other trading partners manipulate their exchange rates, and (b) the nature of the Chinese exchange rate regime since July 2005. On the first issue, we investigate...

This Paper examines pitfalls of a state-dominated financial system in the context of China. These include possible segmentation of the internal capital market due to local government interference and misallocation of capital. First, we employ two standard tools from the international finance...

This Paper constructs and analyses a long run time series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the late...

This paper evaluates the contribution of seigniorage and implicit taxation of financial intermediation to the financing of the budget deficits in Spain and Portugal during the 1980s. The paper starts with a simple partial equilibrium model of the banking sector, which is used to derive two sets...

We study the interbank markets for overnight loans of the major industrial countries, linking the behaviour of short-term interest rates to the operating procedures of these countries’ central banks. We find that many of the key behavioural features of US federal funds rates, on which previous...

This Paper provides the first empirical examination of the microstructure of the euro money market, using tick data from brokers located in six countries. Special emphasis is put on the institutional environment (monetary policy decisions and their implementation, payment systems and private...

Repo auctions are multiunit auctions regularly used by central banks to inject liquidity into the banking sector. Banks have a fundamental need to participate because they have to satisfy reserve requirements. Superficially, repo auctions resemble treasury auctions; the format and rules are...

The paper uses Italian daily data from January 1991 to July 1992 (a period in which the lira belonged to the narrow EMS band without foreign exchange controls) to measure the relationship between liquidity and interest rates. The high quality of the data allows us to separate that part of...

The present study provides estimates of the Effective Marginal Tax Rates (EMTRs) for a sample of 17 OECD countries and 11 manufacturing sectors in a single framework encompassing capital, labour and energy taxes. Our cross-country/cross-sector approach allows us comparing the incentives provided...