Since February 2003 a number of debtor countries have issued bonds with collective action clauses (CACs) under New York law - a development welcomed by the official sector as tangible progress towards more orderly crisis resolution. Not all of these countries, however, have opted for the same...

Over the past few years there has been an active debate among policy-makers on appropriate mechanisms for restructuring sovereign debt, particularly international bonds. In this paper a simple theoretical model is developed to analyse the merits of these proposals. The analysis suggests that...

This paper evaluates a class of simple policy rules that feed back from expected values of future inflation--inflation forecast-based rules. The rules are assessed by how well they perform when the economy is buffeted by a combination of shocks, whose distribution is drawn from the Bank of...

The leading indicator properties of various of the money and credit aggregates over real activity and inflation is assessed, using Granger-causality tests and impulse response functions. The approach is explicitly disaggregated, looking at sectoral measures of money and credit and various...

Is further economic convergence between European Monetary System (EMS) member countries desirable? This paper addresses some of the convergence issues currently being raised in the debate over Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in Europe, with particular emphasis on the behaviour of real interest...

Current discussions on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in Europe have stressed the need for enhanced integration of goods and factor markets as a pre condition of moving as costlessly as possible to a single currency system. The real interest differential - and hence tests of real interest...

This paper aims to juxtapose the theoretical and empirical literature on policy rules and targeting procedures alongside the United Kingdom's new monetary framework. For example, how does inflation targeting, as practised in the United Kingdom, compare with the optimal feedback rule for monetary...

This paper presents a theoretical framework that allows a decomposition of 'surprises' along the yield curve at the time of monetary policy changes. These surprises can be decomposed into news about policy variables and news about policy preferences, depending on where along the yield curve...

Existing empirical evidence on the effects of IMF intervention on debtor and creditor incentives - so-called moral hazard - is mixed. A new test of creditor moral hazard is developed, which uses some new data and some more stringent identifying restrictions. The test examines the response of the...

This paper offers an analytical framework with which to assess some recent proposals for strengthening the international financial architecture. A model is developed of sovereign liquidity crises that reflect two sources of financial stress - weak fundamentals and self-fulfilling expectations....