This paper estimates the Balassa-Samuelson effects for 11 countries in central and eastern Europe on a disaggregated set of quarterly data covering the period from the mid-1990s to the first quarter of 2008. The Balassa-Samuelson effects are clearly present and explain around 24% of inflation...

This paper aims to explain differences in inflation between six central European economies - Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia - and the euro area in terms of differences in productivity growth between tradable and non-tradable sectors. The coverage of tradable...

This paper evaluates the capacity of emerging market economies (EMEs) to moderate the domestic impact of global financial and monetary forces through their own monetary policies. Those EMEs that are able to exploit a flexible exchange rate are far better positioned than those that devote...

This paper examines the relationship between low interests maintained by advanced economy central banks and credit booms in emerging economies. In a model with crossborder banking, low funding rates increase credit supply, but the initial shock is amplified through the risk-taking channel of...

Is systematic monetary policy a driver of the forward premium puzzle, i.e. the tendency of high interest-rate currencies to appreciate, thus strongly violating Uncovered Interest Parity (UIP)? We address this question by studying a battery of monetary policy rules in a small open economy that is...

This paper explores the role of international reserves as a stabiliser of international capital flows, in particular during periods of global financial stress. In contrast with previous contributions, aimed at explaining net capital flows, we focus on the behaviour of gross capital flows. We...

When does the combination of flexible exchange rates and domestic inflation-oriented monetary policy guarantee insulation from global financial conditions? We examine a dynamic global game model of international portfolio flows where, for some combination of parameters, the unique equilibrium...

This paper explores the record of central bank swaps to draw out four themes. First, this recent device of central bank cooperation had a sustained pre-history from 1962-1998, surviving the transition from fixed to floating exchange rates. Second, Federal Reserve swap facilities have generally...

We document that observed international input-output linkages contribute substantially to synchronizing producer price inflation (PPI) across countries. Using a multi-country, industry-level dataset that combines information on PPI and exchange rates with international and domestic input-output...

In an interconnected world, national economic policies regularly lead to large international spillover effects, which frequently trigger calls for international policy cooperation. However, the premise of successful cooperation is that there is a Pareto inefficiency, i.e. if there is scope to...