The North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008-2009 has spurred renewed interest in reforming the international monetary system, which has been malfunctioning in many aspects. Large and volatile capital flows have promoted greater volatility in financial markets, leading to recurrent financial...

The governance structure in global bodies like the IMF continues to be disproportionally dominated by advanced economies. Sustained rapid growth in emerging and developing economies (EDEs) in the past 2-3 decades has led to their growing relative weight in the global economy, but with little...

Uphill capital flows constitute a key transmission channel through which reserve accumulation can distort the stability of the international monetary system. This paper examines and quantifies the importance of this transmission channel by examining how foreign official purchases of U.S....

We identify current challenges for creating stable, yet efficient financial systems using lessons from recent and past crises. Reforms need to start from three tenets: adopting a system-wide perspective explicitly aimed at addressing market failures; understanding and incorporating into...

Motivated by the tension first revealed during the global financial crisis between thedomestic and international financial stability obligations of central bank reserve managers,this paper offers some reflections along four main lines. First, the paper highlights howofficial reserve management...

Why did monetary authorities hold large gold reserves under Bretton Woods (1944-1971) when only the US had to? We argue that gold holdings were driven by institutional memory and persistent habits of central bankers. Countries continued to back currency in circulation with gold reserves,...

This paper provides new evidence on the role of IMF programs in stimulating private sector investments. Using detailed firm-level data on tangible fixed assets and a local projection methodology, we first estimate the dynamic response of firm investments to the approval of an IMF arrangement. We...

In the early 1870s, the global monetary system transitioned from bimetallism—a regime in which gold and silver currencies were tied at quasi-fixed exhange ratios—to the gold standard that was characterized by the use of (only) gold as the main currency metal by the largest and most advanced...

This paper argues that in reserve currency issuing economies at the effective lower bound, outright transfers from the central bank to households are both more equitable and more effective in achieving monetary policy objectives than asset purchases or negative interest rates. It shows that...

The paper presents a tractable model to understand how international financial institutions (IFIs) should deal with the sovereign debt crisis of a systemic country, in which case private creditors' bail-ins entail international spillovers. Besides lending to the country up to its borrowing...