African countries have accumulated substantial foreign currency reserves in recent years, mostly from higher commodity exports as well as aid flows. In the context of macroeconomic stabilization, which remains at the forefront of national economic policymaking and aid conditionality, African...

We investigate hold-up problems in debt financing among publicly traded firms with apparently limited information asymmetries. Based on the prediction by Rajan (1992), we examine how changes in short-term bank loan ratio affect firm investment behavior. We confirm that, while investment by...

This paper studies monetary and exchange rate policy in a world of global value chains. Using recent microdata from Japan and Russia, devaluations are shown to negatively affect exporters in terms of employment, domestic revenue and profitability relative to nonexporting firms. Given their...

The foreign exchange reserves of the Czech National Bank (CNB) increased roughly three and a half times to EUR 124.6 billion while the exchange rate commitment was in place between November 2013 and April 2017. This unprecedented growth has led the CNB to review how the reserves are managed....

This paper presents a rule for foreign exchange interventions (FXI), designed to preserve financial stability in floating exchange rate arrangements. The FXI rule addresses a market failure: the absence of hedging solution for tail exchange rate risk in the market (i.e. high volatility). Market...

This Working Paper examines India's growth and employment generation performance over the last ten years in the context of key indicators such as fiscal and current account balances and inflation and suggests priorities for macroeconomic reforms. An improvement in the central Government's...

Central banks in developing countries, wanting to devalue the domestic currency, usually intervene in the foreign exchange market by buying up foreign currency using domestic money-often backing this up with sterilization to counter inflationary pressures. Such interventions are usually...

Although most CIS and East Asian countries are de jure classified as free floaters, they de facto pursue (tight) dollar pegs. This paper emphasizes dollar denomination of shortterm and long-term payment flows as reasons for exchange rate stabilization. Based on the analysis of ‚competitive...

The volatility of interest rates is relevant for many financial applications. Under realistic assumptions the term structure of interest rate differentials provides an important prediction of the term structure of interest rates. This paper derives the term structure of differentials in a...

The process of international interest rate convergence for arbitrary terms (represented by the term structure of interest rate differentials) is derived in a model of a small open economy which faces a purely time-contingent exchange rate regime switch from flexible to fixed rates. Special...