In recent years, Fund staff has prepared cross-country analyses of macroeconomic vulnerabilities in low-income countries, focusing on the risk of sharp declines in economic growth and of debt distress. We discuss routes to broadening this focus by adding several macroeconomic and macrofinancial...

This paper studies the transmission of bank capital shocks to loan supply in Indonesia. A series of theoretically founded dynamic panel data models are estimated and find nonlinear effects of capital on loan growth: the response of weaker banks to changes in their capital positions is larger...

We develop a theory of money and credit as competing payment instruments, then put it to work in applications. Buyers can use cash or credit, with the former (latter) subject to the inflation tax (transaction costs). Frictions that make the choice of payment method interesting also imply...

We explore monetary policy transmission by estimating VAR impulse response functions to illustrate the Belarusian economy's response to unexpected changes in policy and exogenous variables. We find a significant exchange rate pass-through to prices, and interest rate policy following, rather...

Do changes in monetary policy affect inflation and output in the East African Community (EAC)? We find that (i) Monetary Transmission Mechanism (MTM) tends to be generally weak when using standard statistical inferences, but somewhat strong when using non-standard inference methods; (ii) when...

The consensus among central bankers is that higher inflation expectations can drive up inflation today, requiring tighter policy. We assess this by devising a novel method for identifying shocks to inflation expectations, estimating a semi-structural VAR where an expectation shock is identified...

The Bank of Japan has used unconventional monetary policies to fight deflation and stabilize the financial system since the late 1990s. While the Bank of Japan's reflation efforts have evolved over time, inflation and inflation expectations have remained stubbornly low. This paper examines the...

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries using a structural vector autoregressive model. The results indicate that the interest rate and bank lending channels are relatively effective in influencing...

Assessing when credit is excessive is important to understand macro-financial vulnerabilities and guide macroprudential policy. The Basel Credit Gap (BCG) - the deviation of the credit-to-GDP ratio from its long-term trend estimated with a one-sided Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter - is the...