This paper asks whether developing countries can reap credibility gains from submitting policy to a strict monetary rule. Following earlier work, we look at the gold standard era (1880-1914) as a "natural experiment" to test whether adoption of a rule-based monetary framework such as the gold...

Recurrent concerns over debt sustainability in emerging and developed nations have prompted renewed debate on the role of fiscal rules. Their optimality, however, remains unclear. We provide a quantitative analysis of fiscal rules in a standard model of sovereign debt accumulation and default...

This paper advances the hypothesis that the world debt crisis was mainly induced by the dramatic rise of US interest rates in the first half of the eighties. It sees this rise in interest rates primarily as a result of a tight US monetary policy and excessively large investment incentives...

In this paper we discuss fiscal and monetary policy issues facing heavily-indebted poor countries (HIPCs) who receive debt reduction via the enhanced HIPC initiative. This debt relief program is distinguished from previous ones by its conditionality: freed resources must be used for poverty...

This paper examines the role of corruption in the design of monetary policies for developing countries and obtains several interesting results. First, pegged exchange rates, currency boards, or dollarization, while often prescribed as a solution to the problem of a lack-of-credibility for...

Dollarization, in a broad sense, is increasingly a defining characteristic of many emerging market economies. How important is this trend quantitatively and how important is it for the conduct of monetary policy and the choice of exchange rate regimes? Though these questions have become a hot...

Microeconomic evidence indicates a very high frequency of price adjustment in low income countries (LICs), raising the question of whether LICs may be reasonably characterized as exhibiting monetary neutrality. To address this question, we analyze a cross-country panel dataset of 79 LICs over...