Interest rate caps, despite their intended objective of broadening financial inclusion, can have undesirable effects on financial inclusion under certain conditions. This paper examines the effect of microfinance-loan interest rate caps on financial inclusion in Cambodia. Based on a...

For about three decades until the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), Covered Interest Parity (CIP) appeared to hold quite closely-even as a broad macroeconomic relationship applying to daily or weekly data. Not only have CIP deviations significantly increased since the GFC, but potential...

This paper models the relationship between short-term rates and excess reserves in an interest rate corridor as a logistic function estimated for the Eurosystem. The estimate helps to identify conditions in which short-term rates become unanchored, that is, they move away from the policy rates...

A prolonged low-interest-rate environment presents a significant challenge to banks and is likely to entail major changes to their business models over the long-run. Lower returns to maturity transformation in the face of flatter yield curves and an inability to offer deposit rates significantly...

Most short-term interest rates in the Euro area are below the European Central Bank deposit facility rate, the rate at which the central bank remunerates banks' excess reserves. This unexpected development coincided with the start of the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP). In this paper, we...

We estimate the latent factors that underlie the dynamics of the sovereign bond yield curve in Morocco during 2004-14 based on the Dynamic Nelson-Siegel model. On this basis, we explore the interaction between macroeconomic variables and the yield curve, which is of direct relevance to...

This paper studies the behavior of interest rate differentials in Mexico during the 1992-94 period. It shows that the currency risk premia is positively related to the share of peso denominated debt in total debt and that the magnitude of this effect is considerable. For every 1 percentage point...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

This paper reexamines some unsettled theoretical and empirical issues regarding the relationship between nominal exchange rates and interest rate differentials and provides a model for the behavior of exchange rates in the long run, where interest rates are determined in the bond market. The...