The worst global downturn since the Great Depression has caused ballooning budget deficits in most nations, as tax revenues collapse and governments bail out financial institutions and attempt countercyclical fiscal policy. With notable exceptions, most economists accept the desirability of...

We develop a stylized balance sheet framework to help identify ‘quasi-fiscal’ components of central bank crisis interventions and show how sources of fiscal risk are created from both the new claims and how they are funded. Combining central bank balance sheet data with survey evidence from...

Governments around the world are attempting to support individuals' incomes, rescue distressed businesses, and preserve employer-employee relationships damaged in the coronavirus pandemic by adopting fiscal stimulus programs of unprecedented scale. Although the bulk of this spending will involve...

Words are critical in how the public perceives the work of central banks and the quality of monetary policy. Press releases that accompany policy rate decisions and, where available, the minutes of central bank committee meetings, are focal points for the media in public discussions about the...

In recent months, sovereign wealth funds have received much attention and criticism on the world stage. This paper analyzes these funds from a multidimensional perspective, showing their relative size, origins, history, strategies, and what regulatory oversight they have. Next, it examines why...

This study analyzes the effectiveness of capital controls on international debt flows using data of 81 economies, including both advanced and emerging economies, over the period from 1995 to 2019. The analysis using the total sample shows that, although they are in the expected directions, the...

The worst global downturn since the Great Depression has caused ballooning budget deficits in most nations, as tax revenues collapse and governments bail out financial institutions and attempt countercyclical fiscal policy. With notable exceptions, most economists accept the desirability of...

In January 2007 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published, on an ad hoc basis, a series of financial soundness indicators (FSIs) based on a common methodology (the IMF compilation Guide) for 62 countries, including all 27 European Union countries. The European Central Bank (ECB), jointly...

Most evidence for the resource curse comes from cross-country growth regressions suffers from a bias originating from the high and ever-evolving volatility in commodity prices. This paper addresses these issues by providing new cross-country empirical evidence for the effect of resources in...

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) provide cross-country evidence that the resource curse is a 'red herring' once one corrects for endogeneity of resource exports and allows resource abundance affect growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer significant while the value of...