How far to go – and to remain – in the direction of highly expansionary monetary policy hinges on the balance of marginal benefits and costs of additional monetary easing and its expected evolution over time. This paper sketches a framework for assessing this balance and applies it to four...

Following Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comments before Congress that the FOMC may ‘take a step down in the pace of asset purchases if economic improvement appears to be sustained’, US 10-year interest rates picked up sharply and gross capital flows to emerging market economies (EMEs) reversed....

This paper compares supply and demand to assess to what extent there can be a market for GDP-linked bonds (GLBs). For the government side, simulations illustrate the debt-stabilisation property of GLBs. These simulations consider shock persistence with a VAR structure and large events with...

During the commodity price spikes in 2007-08 and 2010-11, several countries implemented temporary export restrictions on staple foods in an attempt to protect domestic consumers from rising and volatile prices. The impacts of these policies, however, are not limited to the countries that are...