Traditional narratives of external imbalances have focused on the analysis of national accounts, trade flows, and financial flows. They have generated two opposing views of the current situation of the world economy: on one side, a prudent, if not pessimistic view considers large imbalances as...

A widely shared view holds that there is no policy-exploitable causal connection from saving to growth because domestic saving is fully endogenous, optimally determined, or substitutable by foreign saving. Yet, abandoning these assumptions, which are questionable in the real world of frictions,...

This paper surveys the academic and policy debate on the roots of global imbalances, their role in the inception of the global crisis, and their prospects in its aftermath. The conventional view holds that global imbalances result primarily from unsustainably high demand for goods in the United...

This paper presents an analysis of the effect of remittances on the current account in developing and emerging economies, incorporating an assessment of the extent to which exchange rate regimes impact the relationship. The main findings suggest there is a positive effect of remittances on the...

Turkey has moved rapidly from a current account that was relatively in balance up to the turn of the millennia, to sustaining relatively large current account deficits over the past 15 years. Using annual data from 1986 to 2017 and a jackknife model-averaging estimator, the paper estimates the...

The standard macro(prudential) models focus on externalities and treat all prudential instruments as alternative, but equivalent, forms of Pigouvian taxes. This paper explicitly models individual banks' risk choices and shows that different prudential instruments affect banks' risk-taking...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyze and derive simple budget rules in the face of volatile public revenue from natural resources in a low-income country like Niger. The simulation results suggest three policy lessons or rules of thumb. When a resource...

The standard macro(prudential) models focus on externalities and treat all prudential instruments as alternative, but equivalent, forms of Pigouvian taxes. This paper explicitly models individual banks' risk choices and shows that different prudential instruments affect banks' risk-taking...

Commodity price increases associated with the entry of China, India, and other countries into the world economy have led to increased pressure on common-property renewable natural resources. The problem is particularly worrisome for economies that obtain a large share of their income from the...

The recent Asian currency crisis was caused by large prospective fiscal deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems. Absent the political will to raise taxes or cut spending, governments must resort to seignorage revenues to pay for the bailout of the banking...