The paper examines the evolution of public sector debt levels and structures in 12 emerging market countries around the time of financial crises. In particular, it focuses on whether the debt situation of sovereign borrowers became more vulnerable in the aftermath of crises. The principal...

We construct a financial vulnerability indicator that is consistent with the theoretical literature on determinants of defaults. It is based on the amount of new foreign financing that is needed to avoid a default or an import adjustment, expressed as a proportion of the country's sources of...

This paper proposes a new empirical measure of cooperative versus conflictual crisis resolution following sovereign default and debt distress. The index of government coerciveness is presented as a proxy for excusable versus inexcusable default behaviour and used to evaluate the costs of default...

This paper proposes a new taxonomy of monetary regimes defined by the choice and clarity of the nominal anchor. The regimes are as follows: (i) monetary nonautonomy, (ii) weak anchor, (iii) money anchor, (iv) exchange rate peg, (v) full-fledged inflation targeting, (vi) implicit price stability...

Does the bank lending channel of monetary transmission work in Turkey? Using the May- June 2006 financial turbulence as an exogenous shock that prompted a significant tightening of monetary policy, this paper examines the loan supply response of Turkey's banks, depending on their balance sheet...

This paper extends a small linear model of the Israeli economy to allow for nonlinearities in the inflation-output process that arise from convexity in the Phillips curve and endogenous monetary policy credibility. We find that the dynamic responses to shocks in the extended model more closely...

Much of the information communicated by central banks is noisy or imperfect. This paper considers the potential benefits and limitations of central bank communications in a model of imperfect knowledge and learning. It is shown that the value of communicating imperfect information is ambiguous....

Under a flexible inflation targeting regime, should policymakers avoid any reaction to movements in the foreign exchange market? Using data for six advanced open economies explicitly targeting inflation, the paper examines empirically whether real exchange rate disequilibria systematically...

This paper explores the determinants of long-term government bond yields in the Group of Seven (G-7) economies and analyzes the factors that could explain the conundrum of very low rates in the face of a variety of adverse factors in recent years. In particular, the paper focuses on the...

This paper proposes a theory to explain why a politician delegates policy tasks to a technocrat in an independent institution. It formalizes the rationales for delegation highlighted by Hamilton (1788) and by Blinder (1998). Delegation trades-off the cost of having a possibly incompetent...