We use a cross-country panel framework to analyze the effect of net official flows (chiefly foreign exchange intervention) on current accounts. We find that net official flows have a large but plausible effect on current account balances. The estimated effects are larger with instrumental...

With global supply chains, any value added or production task can be traded as part of goods. This means that competitiveness can be measured either in terms of “tasks” (Bems and Johnson, 2012), or goods, but with goods prices reflecting the cost of tasks embedded in those goods. We show...

This paper uses a novel variant of identification through hetroscedacity to estimate spillovers across U.S., Euro area, Japanese, and UK government bond and equity markets in a vector autoregression. The results suggest that U.S. financial shocks reverberate around the world much more strongly...

This paper questions the view that leverage should have forewarned us of the global financial crisis of 2007-09, pointing to several gearing indicators that were neither useful portents of the onset of the crisis nor of its ferocity. Instead it shows, first, that the use of ill-suited collateral...

The last decade has seen widespread deregulation of domestic financial markets in the United Kingdom. This paper uses regional household data to investigate the connection between consumption and financial innovation. It is concluded that deregulation has led to a significant increase in the...

The effects of the marked slowdown in the growth of the capital stock in South Africa since 1985, associated with political uncertainty and financial sanctions, and future growth prospects are quantified using a modified version of the Lewis development model. This is done by estimating...

Africa has more countries than any other continent, and hence the largest number of potential monetary and exchange rate arrangements. This paper looks at whether the existing highly fractured monetary arrangements in Sub-Saharan Africa correspond to what might be expected from the theory of...

The effect of membership of the ERM on macroeconomic performance is analyzed using vector autoregression techniques. The results indicate that while the ERM has had little effect on the nature of the shocks hitting the economies, it has had a significant effect on the response of member...