This paper examines how economic shocks affect individual well-being in developing countries. Using the case of a sudden and unanticipated currency devaluation in Botswana as a quasi-experiment, we examine how this monetary shock affects individuals' evaluations of well-being. We do so by using...

Despite welfare and poverty-reducing benefits for recipient households, remittance inflows have been shown to entail macroeconomic challenges; producing Dutch Disease-type effects through their upward (appreciation) pressure on real exchange rates, reducing the quality of institutions, delaying...

We introduce subsistence requirements in food consumption into a simple new-Keynesianmodel with flexible food and sticky non-food prices. We study how the endogenous structuraltransformation that results from subsistence affects the dynamics of the economy, the design ofmonetary policy, and the...

Over the past two decades, many low-income developing countries have substantially increased openness towards external financing and have received large capital inflows. Using bank-level micro data, this paper finds that capital inflows have been associated with financial deepening through...

Inflation in low-income countries is often high and volatile, driven by external shocks. In addition, inflation in fragile states is affected by highly volatile domestic factors that complicate monetary policy’s ability to deliver price stability. We estimate the drivers of inflation in Guinea...

Building on Samir Amin’s world monetary system theory, this paper proposes a dependency approach for understanding financial underdevelopment. This approach is examined in relation to the function of the banking system in Egypt, where financial inclusion and financial development indicators...

This paper examines the effects of macroeconomic policy and regulatory environment on mobile money usage. Specifically, we develop an autoregressive distributed lag model to investigate the effect of key macroeconomic variables and mobile money tax on mobile money usage in Uganda. Using monthly...

This paper examines the effects of macroeconomic policy and regulatory environment on mobile money usage. Specifically, we develop an autoregressive distributed lag model to investigate the effect of key macroeconomic variables and mobile money tax on mobile money usage in Uganda. Using monthly...

This paper studies the evolution of the natural interest rate in five Southeast Asian countries and considers the effect of economic shocks on the natural interest rate in these countries. The natural interest rate is the interest rate that would prevail in an economy in equilibrium and in the...

We explore the historical composition of the Federal Reserve's Treasury portfolio and its effect on Treasury yields. Using data from 1985 to 2016, we show that the divergence of the composition of the Federal Reserve's portfolio from overall Treasury securities outstanding is associated with a...