A key challenge facing most emerging market economies today is how to simultaneouslymaintain monetary independence, exchange rate stability and financial integration subjectto the constraints imposed by the Trilemma, in an era of widespread globalization. In thispaper we overview and contrast...

We study the curious patterns of gold holding and trading by central banksduring 1979-2010. With the exception of several discrete step adjustments,central banks keep maintaining passive stocks of gold, independently of thepatterns of the real price of gold. We also observe the synchronization...

This paper investigates the factors explaining exchange market pressures (EMP) and thehoarding and use of international reserves (IR) by emerging markets during the 2000s, as the GreatModeration turned to the 2008-9 global crisis and great recession. According to our results, bothfinancial and...

We estimate the pricing of sovereign risk for sixty countries based on fiscal space (debt/tax;deficits/tax) and other economic fundamentals over 2005-10. We measure how accurately themodel predicts sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads, focusing in particular on the fivecountries in the...

This paper examines changes in regional inequality in India in the 1990s, using data for 59 of India’s 78 agro-climatic regions from the National Sample Survey. It extends the work of Singh et al. (2003) in two ways. First, it allows for differences in baseline growth performance across...

The policy Trilemma (the ability to accomplish only two policy objectives out of financialintegration, exchange rate stability and monetary autonomy) remains a valid macroeconomicframework. The financial globalization during 1990s-2000s reduced the weighted average ofexchange rate stability and...

We investigate the relationship between economic growth and lagged internationalcapital flows, disaggregated into FDI, portfolio investment, equity investment, and shorttermdebt. We follow about 100 countries during 1990-2010 when emerging marketsbecame more integrated into the international...

In this paper we explore lessons from the global liquidity crisis pertaining to the prudential supervision role of central bank in an open economy. The narrow view of the role of central banks has been seriously challenged by the global liquidity crisis of 2008-9. The crisis validates central...

There is no clear theoretical prediction regarding whether home computers are an important input in the educational production function. To investigate the hypothesis that access to a home computer affects educational outcomes, we conduct the first-ever field experiment involving the provision...