This paper examines whether multinational banks have a stabilising or a destabilising role during times of financial distress. With a focus on Europe, it looks at how these banks’ foreign affiliates have been faring during the recent financial crisis. It finds that retail and corporate lending...

In this paper we propose a new security, the Call Option Enhanced Reverse Convertible (COERC). The security is a form of contingent capital, i.e. a bond that converts into equity when the market value of equity relative to debt falls below a certain trigger. The conversion price is set...

Banking systems have rapidly grown to a point where for many countries bank assets amount to multiples of GDP. As a consequence, government’s capacity to provide stability-enhancing fiscal guarantees against systemic crises can no longer be taken for granted. As regulation of dynamic financial...

We extend the method of indirect inference testing to data that is not filtered and so may be non-stationary. We apply the method to an open economy real businss cycle model on UK data. We review the method using a Monte Carlo experiment and find that it performs accurately and has good power.

It is difficult to obtain reliable measures of evolving openness to trade, despite its relevance to models of growth, inflation and exchange rates. Our innovative technique measures trade openness encompassing both observable trade policy (tariffs and surcharges) and unobservable trade policy...

We analyse how globalization forces induce monetary authorities, guided in their policies by the welfare criterion of a representative household, to put greater emphasis on reducing the inflation rate than on narrowing the output gaps. Specifically, I demonstrate how the relative weight of the...

The aim of this paper is to understand whether international trade may enhance innovation and growth through an increase in competition. We develop a two-country endogenous growth model, both countries producing the same set of goods, with firm specific R&D and a continuum of oligopolistic...

The paper analyses how globalization forces induce monetary authorities, guided in their policies by the welfare criterion of a representative household, to put greater emphasis on reducing the inflation rate than on narrowing the output gaps. We demonstrate that the marginal rate of...

Understanding how import prices adjust to exchange rates helps anticipate inflation effects and monetary policy responses. This paper examines exchange rate passthrough to the monthly import price index in South Africa during 1980-2009. A methodological innovation allows various short-run...

South Africa in the 1990s became globally more integrated after years of isolation. Opening the trade and capital accounts gave impetus to a monetary policy regime change to inflation targeting from 2000, after a costly transitional period of monetary mismanagement with low policy transparency....