China has been provoked into speeding renminbi internationalization. But despite rapid growth in offshore financial markets in RMB, the Chinese authorities are essentially trapped into maintaining exchange controls-reinforced by financial repression in domestic interest rates→to avoid an...

In this paper, we examine the role of global and domestic credit supply shocks in macroeconomic fluctuations for Emerging Markets. For this purpose, we impose a set of zero and sign restrictions within a medium-scale Bayesian Vector Auto-Regressive model. Quarterly data from South Africa and G-7...

This paper first searches for the drivers of the Greek depression in the aftermath of the 2007-8 global crisis and in turn looks for engines of sustained growth. We use a micro-founded macroeconomic model calibrated to Greece. Our simulations show that the adopted adjustment program (namely, the...

We study the short-run effect of elections on monetary aggregates in a sample of 85 low and middle income democracies (1975 - 2009). We find an increase in the growth rate of M1 during election months of about one tenth of a standard deviation. A similar effect can neither be detected in...

Asia, particularly its major economies has witnessed slower growth in recent years. To make Asia more economically sustainable and resilient against external shocks to recover from the falling growth, most regional economies need to rebalance their export-oriented (mostly to advanced economies)...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

We propose a development-compatible refunding system designed to mitigate climate change. Industrial countries pay an initial fee into a global fund. Each country chooses its national carbon tax. Part of the global fund is refunded to developing and industrial countries, in proportion to the...

The loans of the IMF, World Bank, and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) are excluded from debt restructuring. This is the result of their preferred creditor status. There are two justifications for the preferred creditor status of MDBs: (a) they give concessional loans, and (b) they...

Our friend and colleague Rüdiger Dornbusch passed away before he was able tocomplete his book based on the Munich Lectures in Economics that he gave inNovember 17, 1998, at the Center for Economic Studies of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.The lectures contain a fascinating overview of the...

While the consequences and effectiveness of IMF conditionality have long been the focus of research, the possible negative impact of IMF conditionality on countries' willingness to ask for an IMF programme - often termed "IMF stigma" - has recently received attention particularly from policy...