This paper investigates possible drivers of volatility in the South African rand since the onset of the global financial crisis. We assess the role played by local and international economic surprises, commodity price volatility, global market risk perceptions, and local political uncertainty....

Partly reflecting structural advantages such a liquidity and strong investor protection, foreigners have built up extremely large positions in U.S. (as well as other dollar-denominated) financial assets. This paper describes the impact on global wealth of an unanticipated shock to U.S. financial...

This paper develops a new approach for exploring the effectiveness of foreign currency intervention, focusing on real exchange cycles. Using band spectrum regression methods, it examines the role of macroeconomic fundamentals in determining the equilibrium real exchange rate at short-, medium-,...

The purpose of this paper is to compare in-sample and out-of-sample performances of three parametric and non-parametric early warning systems (EWS) for currency crises in emerging market economies (EMs). The parametric EWS achieves superior out-of-sample results compared to the non-parametric...

This study focuses on identifying the main factors that influenced country-specific and aggregate demand for IMF concessional financing between 1986 and 2018 and makes within-period and out-of-period forecasts. We find that the external debt level, inflation, and real effective exchange rate are...

The paper presents a global model with systemic and country risks, as well as commodity prices. We show that systemic risk shocks have an important impact on world economic activity, with the busts in world output gap corresponding to unobserved systemic risk associated with major financial...

This paper investigates the drivers of reserves in emerging markets (EMs) and small island (SIs) and develops an operational metric for estimating reserves in SIs taking into account their unique characteristics. It uses quantile regression techniques to allow the estimated factors driving...

In this paper, we study the impact of labor market restructuring and foreign direct investment on the banking sector, using a dynamic general equilibrium model with a financial sector. Numerical simulations are performed using stylized Chinese data, and banks failures are generated through...

We analyze the causes of the apparent bias towards optimism in growth forecasts underpinning the design of IMF-supported programs, which has been documented in the literature. We find that financial variables observable to forecasters are strong predictors of growth forecast errors. The greater...