Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

This Selected Issues paper on Mexico presents econometric investigation of the cyclical determinants of remittances to Mexico. The aggregate U.S. business cycle is not necessarily relevant for remittances. Remittances to Mexico do show a significant relationship with employment conditions in...

This paper discusses the Arrangement for Mexico Under the Flexible Credit Line (FCL) and Cancellation of the Current Arrangement. The recent upward trend in output in Mexico is expected to continue, leading to projected growth of 4 percent for 2010. Financial inflows are projected to gradually...

The basic purpose of this study is to didactically demonstrate the factors shaping the currency swap stock of domestic banks prior to the crisis and to provide a descriptive analysis of how the structure and the functioning of the market changed during the crisis. The main conclusions of the...

This study is motivated by two major considerations. First, the Fletcher andTaylor (1996) approach has yet to be applied to short-date markets to assess thediminishing role of transaction costs in explaining the devjatjons of observed forwardforeign exchange prices from interest parity forward...

Internationally operating firrns naturally face the decision whether or not to hedge the currencyrisk implied by foreign investments. In a recent paper, Bos, Mahieu and van Dijk (2000) evaluatethe returns from optimal and alternative currency hedging strategies, for a series of 7 models,using...

The forward premium puzzle (FPP) is the negative correlation between the forward premium and the realized exchange rate return at maturities of a month and beyond. Some recent evidence shows that at maturities of multiple years and at the highest intra day frequency the correlation is positive...

We compare option-implied correlation forecasts from a dataset consisting of over 10 years of daily data on over-the-counter (OTC) currency option prices to a set of return-based correlation measures and assess the relative quality of the correlation forecasts. We find that while the predictive...

We assess monetary convergence preceding the implementation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) through Kalman filtering estimates of the risk premium of eleven forward exchange rates of European and non-European currencies. Since all participating currencies are in effect identical from...

The uncovered interest rate parity equation is the cornerstone of most models in international macro. However, this equation does not hold empirically since the forward discount, or interest rate differential, is negatively related to the subsequent change in the exchange rate. This forward...