Over the past decade, prudent fiscal management has served Thailand well in cushioning the impact of the global financial turbulence. However, going forward, fiscal risks which include a weakened global economic outlook, unbalanced fiscal structure and growing contingent liabilities may have...

In this paper bank bailout rules and central bank independence (CBI) are determined by majority voting. The failure of a bank is socially costly, since bailouts are financed by distortionary taxation. The tax distortion can be reduced via monetization, i.e. lowering CBI; but monetization causes...

Effective risk management at central banks is best enabled by a sound framework embedded throughout the organization that supports the design and execution of risk management activities. To evaluate the risk management practices at a central bank, the Safeguards Assessments Division of the IMF's...

In the debate on monetary policy strategies on both sides of the Atlantic, it is now almost a commonplace to contrast the Fed and the ECB by pointing out the former's flexibility and capacity to adjust rigidity, and the latter's extreme caution, and obsession with low inflation. In looking at...

Does an inflation conservative central bank agrave; la Rogoff (1985) remain desirable in a setting with endogenous fiscal policy? To provide an answer we study monetary and fiscal policy games without commitment in a dynamic stochastic sticky price economy with monopolistic distortions. Monetary...

This paper provides a detailed examination of a new set of fiscal forecasts for the U.S. assembled by Croushore and van Norden (2017) from FOMC briefing books. The data are of particular interest because (1) they afford a look at fiscal forecasts over six complete business cycles and several...

The scientific reassessment of the economic role of the state after the crisis has renewed interest in Abba Lerner's theory of functional finance (FF). A thorough discussion of this concept is helpful in reconsidering the debate on the nature of money and the origin of the business cycle and...

The scientific reassessment of the economic role of the state after the crisis has brought back Abba Lerner's theory of functional finance (FF). A thorough discussion of this concept is helpful in reconsidering the debate on the nature of money, the origin of the business cycle, and crises. It...

One of the main contributions of Modern Money Theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space that is unconstrained by hard financial limits. Not only can they issue their own currency to pay public debt denominated in their own currency,...