Almost all countries announced fiscal support programs once COVID-19 hit. However, there was significant diversity in the magnitude and composition of these fiscal stimulus programs. These differences were determined by myriad political, financial, social, and economic factors - these factors...

We evaluate the quartile ranking of countries during the Covid-19 pandemic using both official (i.e., confirmed) and excess mortality data. Contrasting countries' rankings using these two data sources reveal sharp and systematic differences. While higher GDP per capita is associated with a worse...

Facing acute strains in the offshore dollar funding markets during the COVID-19 crisis, the Federal Reserve (Fed) implemented measures to provide US dollar liquidity by reinforcing swap arrangements with five major central banks, reactivating them with nine other central banks and establishing a...

We investigate the event-based geopolitical shocks from the Russian invasion of Ukraine on selected agricultural and energy commodities using daily event-based structural vector autoregression (SVAR). We find that the geopolitical shock affects the markets of wheat (3%) and European natural gas...

We investigate the implications of extra-normal government spending under the COVID-19 pandemic for commercial bank lending growth between 2019Q4 and 2020Q4 in a large sample of over 3000 banks from 71 countries. We control for pre-pandemic structural factors, bank characteristics and government...

This paper examines the role of foreign exchange (FX) reserves and other fundamental factors in explaining cross-country differences in foreign currency depreciation observed over the 2021-22 Federal Reserve monetary policy tightening cycle that led to a sharp appreciation of the US dollar....

The global financial crisis has brought increased attention to the consequences of international reserves holdings. In an era of high financial integration, we investigate the relationship between the real exchange rate and international reserves using nonlinear regressions and panel threshold...

The "monetary trilemma" - the hypothesis that full monetary policy autonomy, exchange rate stability, and financial openness cannot simultaneously be achieved - has long been studied. Recently, holding international reserves (IR) has become an important policy instrument, insuring against...