This Selected Issues paper on Morocco analyzes Morocco’s growth performance over the past thirty-five years with a special focus on the more recent past. The paper presents stylized trends in growth; it first puts the overall growth performance of Morocco in an international perspective,...

An implication of the "globalization hazard" hypothesis is that sudden stops could be prevented by offering foreign investors price guarantees on emerging markets assets. These guarantees create a tradeoff, however, because they weaken globalization hazard by creating international moral hazard....

Regional trade arrangements (RTAs) in Africa have been ineffective in promoting trade and foreign direct investment. Relatively high external trade barriers and low resource complementarity between member countries limit both intra- and extraregional trade. Small market size, poor transport...

This paper examines the impact of exchange rate regimes on bilateral trade while differentiating the effects of "words" and "deeds". Our findings-based on an extended database for de jure and de facto exchange rate classifications-show that while fixed exchange rate regimes increase trade, there...

This paper is the first to analyze market impact and execution costs of equity trading by a pension fund. We find that, on average, these costs are nonnegligible. Average market impact costs equal 20 basis points for buys and 30 basis points for sells; average execution costs equal 27 basis...

Statistical time-series approaches to hedging are difficult to beat, especially out-of-sample, and are capable of out-performing many theory-based derivative pricing model approaches to hedging commodity price risks using futures contracts. However, the vast majority of time-series approaches to...

This paper analyses the impact of a minimum price variation (tick) and time priority on the quote dynamics and on trading costs when competition for the order flow is dynamic. It finds that convergence to competitive prices can take time and that the speed of convergence is influenced by the...