Despite the external origin of the financial crisis, the potential impact on India’s corporate sector could be large, as India has become increasingly integrated with the global economy in the past decade. The Selected Issues paper discusses India’s economic development and...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the empirical relationship between corporate leverage—and other indicators of financial health—and investment in Israel, using dynamic panel data techniques. The results suggest that weak balance sheets may well have contributed to the investment...

Economic outcomes in Jamaica have fallen short of the authorities’ objectives in recent years. As the government looks to reinvigorate its growth and debt reduction strategy, it is instructive to examine how exogenous shocks and other unanticipated developments can affect economic...

Currency option implied volatility predicts more efficiently exchange rate volatility for the Polish zloty relative to the Czech koruna, reflecting differences in the frequency of central bank intervention in the foreign exchange market. A GARCH model shows a positive impact of the introduction...

We show the importance of a dynamic aggregation bias in accounting for the PPP puzzle. We prove that established time-series and panel methods substantially exaggerate the persistence of real exchange rates because of heterogeneity in the dynamics of disaggregated relative prices. When...

Unit value export and import indices compiled from returns to customs authorities are often used as surrogates for price indices in the measurement of inflation transmission, terms of trade (effects), and to deflate import and export value series to derive volume series. Their widespread use is...

The paper examines empirically the question of whether more unequal societies spend more on income redistribution than their more egalitarian counterparts. Theoretical arguments on this issue are inconclusive. The political economy literature suggests that redistributive spending is higher in...

This paper studies the implications of the imperfect credibility of an exchange rate target zone on the term structure of forward premia. The relationship between spot and forward exchange rates of different maturities reflects the possibility of repeated realignments of the exchange rate band....

This paper investigates whether Indonesia’s recent currency crisis was due to domestic fundamentals, common external shocks (“monsoons”), or contagion from neighboring countries. Markov-switching models attribute speculative pressure on Indonesia’s currency to domestic political and...

This paper investigates the determinants of the international role of a currency. It argues that standard determinants such as monetary performance and financial openness are at best imperfect indicators of a currency’s stability prospects, because the issuer’s promise of stability is not...