Periods of banking distress are often followed by sizable and long-lasting contractions in bank credit. They may be explained by a declined demand by financially impaired borrowers (the conventional financial accelerator) or by lower supply by capital-constrained banks, a "credit crunch". This...

In recent years, the IMF has released a growing number of reports and other documents covering economic and financial developments and trends in member countries. Each report, prepared by a staff team after discussions with government officials, is published at the option of the member country.

This paper examines the welfare loss of import restrictions on bananas in Australia and whether the import restrictions have turned into a particular form of export promotion. We set up a model in which there is free domestic entry, with banana producers accepting losses in normal years, off-set...

Fixed versus flexible exchange rate dilemma has become a subject of rigorous academic discussions for decades. Advantages of exchange rates flexibility contrasted benefits of exchange rate stability though a phenomenon known as the fear of floating favoured exchange rate variability and its...

We combine two data sets to study price rigidity. The first consists of weekly time series of retail, wholesale, and spot prices for twelve products. These time series contain two exogenous cost shocks. We find that prices exhibit more rigidity in response to the second shock than the first. The...

This paper presents a simple model of a small open economy which is open to both commodity trade and foreign investment of a sector-specific kind, and which exhibits the phenomenon of ‘cross-hauling’, or reverse flows of internationally mobile capital in two different sectors. The model,...

In this paper, decisions regarding production in oil exporting countries are studied by means of theoretical analysis and empirical investigation. Under the assumptions of exogenous oil prices and world oil demand, we are able to describe the relationship between oil production levels and...

A model of the long run equilibrium real exchange rate based upon macroeconomic fundamentals is employed to calculate real exchange rate misalignments for Poland and Russia during the 1990s using the Beveridge and Nelson (1981) decomposition of macrofundamentals into transitory and permanent...

The sources of economic growth and development have been puzzling economists from the modern dawn of the profession. While the Solow-Swan neo-classical model dominated research on growth in the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s saw the emergence of growth theories that disputed, largely on theoretical...