This paper assesses the linkages between money, credit, house prices and economic activity in industrialised countries over the last three decades. The analysis is based on a fixed-effects panel VAR estimated using quarterly data for 17 industrialized countries spanning the period 1970-2006. The...

This paper tests whether the proposition that globalisation has led to greater sensitivity of domestic inflation to the global output gap (the “global output gap hypothesis”) holds for the euro area. The empirical analysis uses quarterly data over the period 1979-2003. Measures of the global...

New Keynesian Phillips Curves (NKPC) have been exten-sively used in the analysis of monetary policy, but yet there are a number of issues of concern about how they are estimated and then related to the underlying macro-economic theory. The first is whether such equations are identified. To check...

A standard repurchase agreement between two counterparties is considered to examine the endogenous choice of collateral assets, the feasibility of secured lending, and welfare implications of the central bank’s collateral framework. As an important innovation, we allow for two-sided...

This paper provides empirical evidence showing that smaller countries tend to have more volatile government spending for a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000. We argue that the larger size of a country decreases the volatility of government spending because it acts as an insurance against...

Using count-data techniques, this paper studies the determinants of currency choice in the issuance of foreign-currency-denominated bonds. In particular, we investigate whether bond issuers choose their issuance currency in order to exploit the borrowing-cost savings associated with deviations...

This paper estimates export and import price equations for 41 countries –including 28 emerging market economies. Further, it relates the estimated elasticities to structural factors and tests for statistical breaks in the relation between trade prices and exchange rates. Results indicate that...

We decompose fiscal policy in three components: i) responsiveness, ii) persistence and iii) discretion. Using a sample of 132 countries, our results point out that fiscal policy tends to be more persistent than to respond to output conditions. We also found that while the effect of cross-country...

There is growing awareness that the distribution of IMF facilities may not be influenced only by the economic needs of the borrowers. This paper focuses on the fact that the IMF may favour geopolitically important countries in the distribution of IMF loans, differentiating between concessional...