Why did monetary authorities hold large gold reserves under Bretton Woods (1944-1971) when only the US had to? We argue that gold holdings were driven by institutional memory and persistent habits of central bankers. Countries continued to back currency in circulation with gold reserves,...

The last decade or so has seen a mushrooming of new sovereign debt databases covering long time spans for several countries. This represents an important breakthrough for economists who have long sought to, but been unable to tackle, first-order questions such as why countries have differential...

This paper reviews the impact of interest rate controls in Kenya, introduced in September 2016. The intent of the controls was to reduce the cost of borrowing, expand access to credit, and increase the return on savings. However, we find that the law on interest rate controls has had the...

The experience of the Great Recession and its aftermath revealed that a lower bound on interestrates can be a serious obstacle for fighting recessions. However, the zero lower bound is not a law of nature;it is a policy choice. The central message of this paper is that with readily available...

This paper is the first attempt to look at inflation dynamics and monetary transmission mechanisms in Armenia in the context of a full information model containing three interrelated markets: foreign exchange, money, and labor. Using the vector error correction model (VECM) approach, we find...

This paper investigates the determinants of inflation in the Dominican Republic during 1991-2002, a period characterized by remarkable macroeconomic stability and growth. By developing a parsimonious and empirically stable error-correction model using quarterly observations, the paper finds that...

Drawing from a unique data set comprising 2,893 banks and 152 countries over the period 1987 to 2000, we test whether the adoption of the Basel Accord by Latin American and Caribbean countries was responsible for the serious slowdowns in credit growth experienced by these countries. We find...

This paper investigates the impact of the new capital requirements introduced under the Basel III framework on bank lending rates and loan growth. Higher capital requirements, by raising banks' marginal cost of funding, lead to higher lending rates. The data presented in the paper suggest that...

This paper investigates empirically the drivers of financial imbalances ahead of the global financial crisis. Three factors may have contributed to the build-up of financial imbalances: (i) rising global imbalances (capital flows), (ii) monetary policy that might have been too loose, (iii)...

This paper provides empirical evidence that the size of the spillovers from U.S. monetarypolicy to non-oil GDP growth in the GCC countries depends on the level of oil prices. Thepotential channels through which oil prices could affect the effectiveness of monetary policyare discussed. We find...