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...

This paper uses vector autoregressions and impulse-response functions to construct a U.S. financial conditions index (FCI). Credit availability—proxied by survey results on lending standards—is an important driver of the business cycle, accounting for over 20 percent of the typical...

This paper explores international bond spillovers using daily and intra-day data on yields on inflation-indexed bonds and associated inflation expectations for the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Sweden, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The analysis starts in 2002, by which point U.S....

This paper examines the impact of central bank communication on market expectations of monetary policy and long-term interest rates by comparing Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) action dates when a policy statement was made to dates before statements were issued. Increased communication has...

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...

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 examines El Salvador’s transition to official dollarization by comparing aspects of this regime to the fixed exchange rate regime prevailing in the 1990s. Commercial bank interest rates are analyzed under an uncovered interest parity framework, and it is found that...