A central bank must decide on the frequency with which it will conduct open market operations and the variability in short-term money market that it will allow. It is shown how the optimal operating procedure balances the value of attaining an immediate target and broadcasting the central...

Market reaction to a change in official interest rates will depend on the extent to which the change is anticipated, and on how it is interpreted as a signal of future policy. In this paper, a technique is developed to separate the anticipated and unanticipated components of such changes and is...

This paper uses a simple model to analyze the forces that determine the size of the public sector and the quality of workers employed in that sector. Workers are heterogeneous, and the public sector chooses an employment strategy that maximizes a social welfare function U(s, Y) that depends on...

This paper presents perhaps the most viable approach for the design of an instrument of government finance (and monetary management) in an Islamic economy where conventional transactions based on an ex-ante promise of a risk-free rate of return are forbidden. Resources to finance government...

We examine the issue of technical assistance versus brain drain repatriation as alternative strategies for transferring scarce skills to a skill-poor economy. Technical assistance relies mainly on expatriate skills and labor from the host country, while brain drain repatriation seeks to effect a...

This paper develops a public education scheme that takes uncertainty aspects of private educational investments explicitly into account. In the author’s framework, the social merits of public education schemes are related to the lack of markets in which students can insure against educational...

Recapitalizing banks in a systemic crisis is a complex medium-term process that requires significant government intervention and careful management at both the strategic and individual bank levels. This paper highlights the range of operational and strategic issues to be addressed and the...

This paper presents evidence that spillovers through bank lending, as opposed to trade linkages and country characteristics, can help explain contagion. We construct a measure of competition for bank funds and find evidence in favor of a common lender effect in the Mexican, Thai, and Russian...

Based on cross-country data for up to 78 countries, this paper shows that fiscal decentralization-the assignment of expenditure and revenue mobilization functions to subnational levels of government-is associated with various indicators of governance, such as corruption, rule of law, and...

This paper studies the effects of demand and supply shocks in the global crude oil market on several measures of countries'' external balance, including the oil and non-oil trade balances, the current account, and changes in net foreign assets (NFA) during 1975-2004. We explicitly take a global...