"During the global financial crisis 2007-2009 fiscal policy was widely used as a stabilization tool. Policymakers allowed a large build-up of public debt resulting from both automatic and discretionary expansionary measures. At the same time, calls for policy coordination stressed that...

How does global risk impact the world economy? In taking up this question, we focus on the dollar’s role in the international adjustment mechanism. First, we rely on high-frequency surprises in the price of gold to identify the effects of global risk shocks in a Bayesian Proxy VAR model. They...

Interest-rate spreads fluctuate widely across time and countries. We illustrate this on the basis of about 3,100 quarterly observations for 21 advanced and 17 emerging economies since the early 1990s. Prior to the financial crisis, spread fluctuations in advanced economies are an order of...

Interest-rate spreads fluctuate widely across time and countries. We characterize their behavior using some 3,200 quarterly observations for 21 advanced and 17 emerging economies since the early 1990s. Before the financial crisis, spreads are 10 times more volatile in emerging economies than in...