This paper questions the view that leverage should have forewarned us of the global financial crisis of 2007-09, pointing to several gearing indicators that were neither useful portents of the onset of the crisis nor of its ferocity. Instead it shows, first, that the use of ill-suited collateral...

International capital flows from rich to poor countries can be regarded as either too low (the Lucas paradox in a one-sector model) or too high (when compared with the logic of factor price equalization in a two-sector model). To resolve the paradoxes, we introduce a non-neoclassical model which...

In the past several years, the ten new Central and Eastern European members of the European Union have enjoyed rapid growth but frequently alongside growing external imbalances. Economists have pointed to rising vulnerabilities, but markets compressed sovereign bond yields. This paper examines...

Stress testing is becoming a widely used tool to assess potential vulnerabilities in a financial system. This paper is intended to answer some of the basic questions that may arise as part of the process of stress testing. The paper begins with a discussion of stress testing in a financial...

The paper proposes a framework for examining the process of financial market development. The framework, consistent with the functional view of financial system design, is anchored in studying the incentives facing the key players in financial markets-borrowers, lenders, liquidity providers, and...

A quantitative framework is developed to bring forward the insurance motive of holding international reserves. The insurance value of reserves is quantified as the market price of an equivalent option that provides the same insurance coverage as the reserves. This quantitative framework is...

The use of collateral has become one of the most widespread risk mitigation techniques. While it brings stabilizing effects to the individual lender we argue that it may exacerbate systemic risk through margin call activation. We show how a liquidity shock to the cash lender may propagate as a...

This paper explores the extent to which macroprudential tools can be used to manage banking sector risks in Mongolia, a commodity producing country exposed to both procyclical and cross-sectional financial sector risks. Loose fiscal policy, rising credit activity, and heightened risk...

The Flexible System of Global Models (FSGM) is a group of models developed by the Economic Modeling Division of the IMF for policy analysis. A typical module of FSGM is a multi-region, forward-looking semi-structural global model consisting of 24 regions. Using the three core modules focused on...

Consumer price indexes (CPIs) are compiled at the higher (weighted) level using Laspeyres-type arithmetic averages. This paper questions the suitability of such formulas and considers two counterpart alternatives that use geometric averaging, the Geometric Young and the (price-updated) Geometric...