In a number of countries, especially emerging market economies, the public sector has in recent years been accumulating sizeable cross-border financial assets, mainly in the form of official foreign exchange reserves. World reserves have risen from USD 1.2 trillion in January 1995 to above USD 4...

This paper analyses the impact of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) on global financial markets. It presents back-of-the-envelope calculations which simulate the potential impact of a transfer of traditional foreign exchange reserves to SWFs on global capital flows. If SWFs behave as CAPM-type...

We analytically derive optimal central bank portfolios in a minimum variance framework with two assets and "transaction demands" caused by sudden stops in capital inflows. In this model, the transaction demands become less important relative to traditional portfolio objectives as debt to reserve...

This paper investigates the role of three likely factors in driving the steady deterioration of the US external balance: US technology developments, changes in the US government fiscal position and the Fed’s monetary policy. Estimating several Vector Autoregressions on US data over the period...

This paper extends the existing literature on the open economy New Keynesian Phillips Curve by incorporating three different factors of production, domestic labor and imported as well as domestically produced intermediate goods, into a general model which nests existing closed economy and open...

We examine the performance of forward-looking inflation-forecast-based rules in open economies. In a New Keynesian two-bloc model, a methodology first employed by Batini and Pearlman (2002) is used to obtain analytically the feedback parameters/horizon pairs associated with unique and stable...

Projected demographic changes in industrialized countries will reduce the share of the working-age population. Analyses based on standard OLG models predict that these changes will increase the capital- labor ratio. Hence, rates of return to capital decrease and wages increase with adverse...

The onset of the financial crisis in 2008 has highlighted the problems of diverging external imbalances within Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the role of persistent losses in competitiveness. This paper starts by investigating some of the competitiveness factors which contributed to...

A growing number of papers have studied positive and normative implications of financial frictions in DSGE models. We contribute to this literature by studying the welfare-based monetary policy in a two-country model characterized by financial frictions, alongside a number of key features, like...

This paper shows that the credibility gain from permanently committing to a fixed exchange rate by joining the European Monetary Union can outweigh the loss from giving up independent monetary policy. When the central bank enjoys only limited credibility a pegged exchange rate regime yields a...