This paper reviews the first five years’ experience with inflation targeting in the United Kingdom. It concludes that inflation performance was not significantly different under inflation targeting than predicted by a VAR model estimated in the period prior to participation in the exchange...

This paper examines the impact of macroeconomic and financial sector policy announcements in the United States, the United Kingdom, the euro area, and Japan during the recent crisis on interbank credit and liquidity risk premia. Announcements of interest rate cuts, liquidity support, liability...

The buffer stock role of absorbing temporary discrepancies between purchases and sales is assigned to money because money, being the most liquid of all assets, performs the buffer function best. However, as this paper shows, the attempts to model the buffer stock role have led to certain...

This paper examines and compares the instruments and procedures currently employed by the central banks of France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States for implementing monetary policy in the short run. The analysis indicates that the monetary authorities of these five...

We study the determinants of employment and wages in the public sector, using a new set of panel data for 34 LDCs and 21 OECD countries from 1972–992, by estimating equations suggested by an efficiency wage model. We find that government employment is positively associated with the relaxation...

Central government wage expenditures accounted for 7 percent of GDP in 99 countries during 1980-90 (unweighted average). Regression analysis indicates that federations, countries with high populations and high per capita incomes, heavily indebted countries, and small low-income economies tend to...

A useful but little known feature of the IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY) is the information on the structure of governments. Institutional tables, included in the GFSY, provide detail on the central, state, and local levels of governments, social security, and...

Conventional wisdom postulates that there are benefits from decentralizing government finances but there is little empirical evidence about actual country practices. This paper presents data on fiscal decentralization for about 80 countries over a period of about 20 years (1990-2008) from the...