This paper surveys the evidence on the effectiveness of monetary transmission in developing countries. We summarize the arguments for expecting the bank lending channel to be the dominant means of monetary transmission in such countries, and present a simple model that suggests why this channel...

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....

This paper reviews the monetary transmission mechanism in low income countries (LICs). We use monetary transmission in advanced and emerging markets as a benchmark to identify aspects of the transmission mechanism that may operate differently in LICs. In particular, we focus on the effects of...

We analyze how the pass-through from exchange rate to domestic wages depends on the degree of integration between domestic and foreign labor markets. Using data from 66 countries over the period 1981–2005, we find that the elasticity of domestic wages to real exchange rate is 0.1 after a year...

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is scarce, limited to few reforms and countries and for few years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital, public, and...

This paper studies the political influence of individual firms on Congressional decisions to suspend tariffs on U.S. imports of intermediate goods. We develop a model in which firms influence the government by transmitting information about the value of protection, via costless messages...

While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work...

Which structural reforms affect the speed the regional convergence within a country? We found that domestic financial development, trade/current account openness, better institutional infrastructure, and selected labor market reforms facilitate regional convergence. However, these reforms have...

Do foreign educated individuals play a role in promoting democracy in their home country? Despite the large amount of private and public resources spent on foreign education, there is no systematic evidence that foreign educated individuals foster democracy in their home countries. Using a...

The current crisis calls for two main sets of policy measures. First, measures to repair the financial system. Second, measures to increase demand and restore confidence. While some of these measures overlap, the focus of this note is on the second set of policies, and more specifically, given...