This paper explores the impact of foreign bank entry on interest-rate pass-through for a panel of 57 emerging and developing economies over 1995-2009. The paper tests for possible thresholds in terms of foreign bank presence that differentially impact interest-rate pass-through. The empirical...

Credit default swaps ("CDSs") were widely blamed as a primary cause of the recent financial crisis; CDSs fomented panic as the price of credit protection spiked and contributed to the Federal Reserve's decision to bail out American International Group. To reduce the likelihood that credit...

We discuss the pros of adopting government-issued digital currencies as well as a supranational digital iCurrency. One such pro is to get rid of paper money (and coinage), a ubiquitous medium for spreading germs, as highlighted by the recent coronavirus outbreak. We set forth three policy...

We investigate the secular increase in the corporate cash holding over the period 1980-2006. We show that along with firm characteristic–related variables, monetary policy and banking structure have a significant bearing on corporate cash holdings, as they determine the opportunity cost of...

This paper investigates the effect of the Federal Reserve's unconventional monetary policy on employment via a bank lending channel. We find that banks with higher mortgage-backed securities holdings issued relatively more loans after the first and third rounds of quantitative easing (QE1 and...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) of southern euro-area economies (e.g. Italy, Spain) pay significantly higher borrowing rates than their peers of the core (e.g. Germany, France) and this divergence is widening. It is argued that severe market failures prevent SMEs in southern euro area...

Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand...

Many emerging markets have undertaken significant financial sector reforms especially in their banking sectors that have been quite critical for both financial development and real economic activity. In this paper, we investigate the success of banking reforms in India where significant banking...

Governors and senior officials representing some two dozen central banks from Africa and other regions of the world met at the BIS in May 2011 to discuss the monetary policy and financial stability issues facing Africa after the global financial crisis. This volume brings together the background...

This paper provides new evidence on the credit channel of monetary policy transmission in India. Using stepwise estimation of vector error correction models, the analysis finds significant, albeit slow, pass-through of policy rate changes to bank interest rates in India. There is evidence of...