The economics literature provides ample evidence that higher corruption discourages FDI inflows. In this paper we address, for the first time in the literature in a systematic way, the exact reverse link, i.e., the empirical effect of FDI inflows on corruption. We present a simple model that...

Following the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, a number of Asian central banks adopted inflation targeting. We explore how successful this framework has been by looking at the persistence of inflation, as measured by the sum of the coefficients in an autoregressive model for inflation, using a...

This paper has three goals. First, it seeks to explain the origins of the Irish crisis. Second, it provides an interim assessment of the Irish government’s management of the crisis. Third, it evaluates the lessons from Ireland for the macroeconomics of monetary unions.

Barter in Russia can be explained by firms' liquidity constraint: it is strongly correlated with financial tightness. However, a microeconomic analysis reveals that the rationale behind this liquidity constraint is different according to the firm situation. For firms in a good economic...

This paper discusses a number of issues that the newly constituted board of the European Central Bank (ECB) will face early on. We show how conducting a European monetary policy is very different from living under the protective umbrella of the Bundesbank. We discuss voting on the ECB board, and...

This paper provides an appraisal of European Central Bank (ECB) policy from the beginning of the financial crisis to the summer of 2014. It argues that, as the crisis unfolded, ECB policy can be characterized as an attempt at finding a middle way between “monetary dominance” embedded in the...

It is well understood that investment serves as a shock absorber at the time of crisis. The duration of the drag on investment, however, is perplexing. For the nine Asian economies we focus on in this study, average investment/GDP is about 6 percentage points lower during 1998-2012 than its...

We model corporate liquidity policy and show that aggregate risk exposure is a key determinant of how firms choose between cash and bank credit lines. Banks create liquidity for firms by pooling their idiosyncratic risks. As a result, firms with high aggregate risk find it costly to get credit...

This paper studies the transmission of monetary shocks to lending rates in a large sample of advanced, emerging, and low-income countries. Transmission is measured by the impulse response of bank lending rates to monetary policy shocks. Long-run restrictions are used to identify such shocks....