Many surveys of the ECB's monetary framework emphasize the inability of financial markets to correctly predict monetary policy decisions. At the same time, these surveys of financial market participants have given relatively high marks to the United States Federal Reserve and the Bank of England...

Interest rates in China comprise a mix of both market determined interest rates (interbank rates and bond yields), and regulated interest rates (lending and deposit rates), reflecting China's gradual process of interest rate liberalization. We argue, using a theoretical model and empirical...

If interest rates (country spreads) rise, debt can rapidly be subject to a snowball effect, which becomes self-fulfilling with regard to the fundamentals themselves. This is a market imperfection, because we cannot be confident that the unaided market will choose the "good" over the "bad"...

This 2013 Article IV Consultation highlights that recent macroeconomic developments in The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia are encouraging, with a significant deceleration in inflation and continued robust economic growth. Despite significant decline in coffee prices and supply...

We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across 18 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To address these...

The IMF’s Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal model (GIMF) is used to examine the scope for structural reforms in the euro area to offset the negative impact of fiscal consolidation required to put public debt back on a sustainable path. The results suggest that structural reforms in core...

In this paper we empirically examine the operation of the traditional Keynesian interest rate channel of the monetary policy transmission mechanism in five potential inflation targeting economies in the MENA region and compare it with fourteen inflation targeting (IT) emerging market economies...

This paper surveys the foreign exchange markets, money and secondary government security markets, and stock exchanges in 107 smaller economy countries. The underdevelopment of these markets impedes risk transfer, monetary policy, corporate financing, and the capacity to absorb capital inflows....