The institutional environments in which central banks operate have become more alike over the past decade. The author examines the monetary policy operating procedures of the Federal Reserve and central banks in Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Switzerland. In particular, he...

This paper seeks to draw lessons from the IMF’s experience in handling financial crises around the globe over the past ten years that are relevant to the challenges faced by countries in Latin America, especially in the wake of the recent crisis in Argentina. Experience suggests that...

This paper examines the pattern of excess liquidity in sub-Saharan Africa and its consequences for the effectiveness of monetary policy. The paper argues that understanding the consequences of excess liquidity requires quantifying the extent to which commercial bank holdings of excess liquidity...

This paper analyzes the determinants of daily changes in Jordan's interbank market overnight rate. It not only quantifies the classic liquidity effect, but also uncovers a liquidity distribution effect on both sides of the market, and shows that their magnitude is a decreasing and convex...

The recent expansion of the balance sheet of the consolidated Federal Reserve Banks (FRB) is analyzed in an historical context. The analysis reveals that the nature of Fed involvement in U.S. financial markets has changed dramatically and its expansion is several orders of magnitude beyond what...

We employ a structural panel VAR model with interaction terms to identify determinants of effective transmission from central bank policy rates to retail lending rates in a large country sample. The framework allows deriving country specific pass-through estimates broken down into the...

I propose a new approach to identifying exogenous monetary policy shocks in low-income countries with capital account restrictions. In the case of Mauritania, a domestic repatriation requirement is the key institutional characteristic that allows me to establish exogeneity. Unlike in advanced...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of central bank purchases of government bonds by investigating the following three questions: Under what conditions are these purchases socially desirable, what incentive problems do they mitigate, and how large are these...