This Mundell Fleming lecture at the International Monetary Fund’s 2001 annual research conference marks the 25th anniversary of Rudiger Dornbusch’s masterpiece, “Expectations and Exchange Rate Dynamics,” a seminal contribution to both policy and research in the field of international...

How should monetary policy respond to large fluctuations in world food prices? We study this question in an open economy model in which imported food has a larger weight in domestic consumption than abroad and international risk sharing can be imperfect. A key novelty is that the real exchange...

The large swings in world food prices in recent years renew interest in the question of how monetary policy in small open economies should react to such imported price shocks. We examine this issue in a canonical open economy setting with sticky prices and where food plays a distinctive role in...

Empirical studies have had little success in finding a statistically significant relationship between fiscal deficits and inflation in broad cross-country panels. This paper provides new econometric estimates for a panel of 23 emerging market countries during 1970-2000. Unlike previous studies,...

Macroeconomic theory postulates that fiscal deficits cause inflation. Yet empirical research has had limited success in uncovering this relationship. This paper reexamines the issue in light of broader data and a new modeling approach that incorporates two key features of the theory. Unlike...

The issue of the appropriate exchange rate regime for individual countries has been perennially lively, and the role played by international capital flows and domestic financial systems in determining the performance of these regimes has gained prominence in the policy debate. Using recent...

Using recent advances in the classification of exchange rate regimes, this paper finds no support for the popular bipolar view that countries will tend over time to move to the polar extremes of free float or rigid peg. Rather, intermediate regimes have shown remarkable durability. The analysis...

This paper lays out a structural model that incorporates key features of monetary transmission in typical emerging-market economies, including a bank-credit channel and the role of external debt accumulation on country risk premia and exchange rate dynamics. We use an SVAR representation of the...

Africa lags behind other regions in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). In some circumstances, there are obvious explanations for the absence of FDI, such as a high incidence of war. In this paper, we examine the role that monetary and exchange rate policy may have played in explaining...