Long-term interest rates in a number of small-open inflation targeting economies co-move more strongly with US long-term rates than with short-term rates in those economies. We augment a standard small open-economy model with imperfectly substitutable government bonds and time-varying term...

This paper evaluates the performance of structural VAR models in estimating the impact of credit supply shocks. In a simple Monte-Carlo experiment, we generate data from a DSGE model that features bank lending and credit supply shocks and use SVARs to try and recover the impulse responses to...

This paper evaluates the performance of a variety of structural VAR models in estimating the impact of credit supply shocks. Using a Monte-Carlo experiment, we show that identification based on sign and quantity restrictions and via external instruments is effective in recovering the underlying...

Over the recent years Malta has experienced a remarkable increase in its labour force due to a large influx of immigrants and an unprecedented increase in the domestic participation. Driven by the observation of such a phenomenon, this paper aims at assessing the impact of foreign and domestic...

Sign-restricted Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) are increasingly common. However, they usually result in a set of structural parameters that have very different implications in terms of impulse responses, elasticities, historical decomposition and forecast error variance decomposition...

Structural VAR models are frequently identified using sign restrictions on impulse responses. Moving beyond the popular but restrictive Normal-inverse-Wishart-Uniform prior, we develop a methodology that can handle almost any prior distribution on contemporaneous responses. We then propose a new...

A Special Economic Zone (SEZ) is a type of managed industrial cluster which focuses on exports and encourages the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) and technology. These "special" zones are given a range of fiscal and non-fiscal incentives, which are not available to firms located in the...

This document analyzes the patterns of fiscal and monetary policy in five economies of the Latin American Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) during four episodes of international crises: 1994, 1997-1999, 2001 and 2008. In contrast with earlier episodes when most...