The impact of monetary policy in large advanced countries on emerging market economies—dubbed spillovers—is hotly debated in global and national policy circles. When the U.S. resorted to unconventional monetary policy, spillovers on asset prices and capital flows were significant,...

Unconventional monetary policy is often assumed to benefit banks. However, we find little supporting evidence. Rather, we find some evidence for heightened medium-term risks. First, in an event study using a novel instrument for monetary policy surprises, we do not detect clear effects of...

We examine the composition and drivers of cross-border bank lending between 1995 and 2012, distinguishing between syndicated and non-syndicated loans. We show that on-balance sheet syndicated loan exposures account for almost one third of total cross-border loan exposures during this period....

We use a cross-country panel framework to analyze the effect of net official flows (chiefly foreign exchange intervention) on current accounts. We find that net official flows have a large but plausible effect on current account balances. The estimated effects are larger with instrumental...

Like most Sub-Saharan African countries, Kenya’s economic growth appears to have been primarily driven by factor accumulation. The Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix for Kenya examines economic developments and policies. During the last two decades, Kenya has been plagued by...

This Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes—Data Module provides an assessment of Israel’s macroeconomic statistics against the Special Data Dissemination Standard complemented by an assessment of data quality based on the IMF’s Data Quality Assessment Framework,...

This paper formulated a short-run model, with an explicit role for monetary policy, for analyzing world oil and gas markets. The model described carefully the parameters of these markets and their vulnerability to business cycles. Estimates showed that short-run demand for oil and gas was price-...

In recent years there has been substantial theoretical and empirical work on the role that financial markets play in fostering economic growth and development. This paper provides a selective review of the literature, as well as new empirical evidence on the relationship between financial...

We study herd behavior in a laboratory financial market with financial market professionals. We compare two treatments, one in which the price adjusts to the order flow so that herding should never occur, and one in which event uncertainty makes herding possible. In the first treatment, subjects...

Despite the liberalization of foreign portfolio investment around the globe since the early 1980s, the home-bias phenomenon is still found to exist. Using a relatively new IMF survey dataset of cross-border equity holdings, this paper tests new structural equations from a consumption-based...