After the decline in oil prices, many oil exporters face the need to improve their externalbalances. Special characteristics of oil exporters make the exchange rate an ineffectiveinstrument for this purpose and give fiscal policy a sizeable role. These conclusions aresupported by regression...

Many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries liberalized their economies in the 1980s and early 1990s. This paper reviews the foreign exchange regime reforms in selected SSA, and their associated macroeconomic policies and economic performance during and after these reforms were undertaken. Before...

We isolate a U.S. dollar currency premium by comparing corporate bonds issued in the dollar and the euro by firms o utside t he U .S. a nd e uro a rea. We make s everal empirical observations that dissect the perceived advantage of borrowing in the dollar. First, while the dollar dominates...

This paper investigates what factors affect the duration of sudden stops in capital flows using quarterly data for a large panel of countries. We find that countries with floating exchange rate regimes tend to experience shorter sudden stop episodes and that fixed exchange rate regimes are...

Superficial examination of aggregate gross cross-border capital inflow data suggests that therewas no substitution between portfolio inflows and bank loans in recent years. However, ournovel analysis of disaggregate inflows (both by types of instrument and borrower) showsinteresting...

In the Mundell-Fleming framework, standard monetary policy and exchange rate flexibility fully insulate economies from shocks. However, that framework abstracts from many real world imperfections, and countries often resort to unconventional policies to cope with shocks, such as COVID-19. This...

The assessment of external positions and exchange rates is a key mandate of the IMF. This paperpresents the updated External Balance Assessment (EBA) framework-a key input in the conduct ofmultilaterally-consistent external sector assessments of 49 advanced and emerging marketeconomies-following...

A view receiving increased support is that the height of trade costs in prime export sectorshas a strong effect on current account balances: countries specializing in sectors that facerelatively high trade costs, such as services, tend to run current account deficits, andsimilarly, countries...

This paper studies the effect of demographic change on national saving, global interest rates, and international capital flows, focusing on the role of the public pension system. We develop a small open economy overlapping generations model to illustrate the channels through which demographic...

Financially closed economies insure themselves against current-account shocks using international reserves. We characterize the optimal management of reserves using an open-economy model of precautionary savings and emphasize several results. First, the welfare-based opportunity cost of reserves...