Do portfolio shifts by the world's largest asset owners respond procyclically to past returns, or countercyclically to valuations? And if countercyclical investment (with both market-stabilizing and return-generating properties) is a public and private good, how might asset owners be empowered...

Resource-rich countries face large and persistent shocks, especially coming from volatile commodity prices. Given the severity of the shocks, it would be expected that these countries adopt countercyclical fiscal policies to help shield the domestic economy. Taking advantage of a new dataset...

This paper finds empirical evidence that faster and smarter containment measures were associated with lower fiscal responses to the COVID-19 shock. We also find that initial conditions, such as fiscal space, income, health preparedness and budget transparency were important in shaping the amount...

The policy response to the COVID-19 shock included regulatory easing across many jurisdictions to facilitate the flow of credit to the economy and mitigate a further ampli-fication of the shock through tighter financial conditions. Using an intraday event study,this paper examines how stock...

In the wake of the recent global crisis the international community is giving an increased focus on stability of the financial system, so-called financial stability analysis. With the increasing need for data sets to undertake this analysis, the question naturally arises as to what types of data...

During the global financial crisis, many central banks in advanced economies engaged in credit easing. These policies have been perceived as largely successful in reducing stress in financial markets, thus avoiding larger output losses. In this paper, we study empirically whether credit easing...

The G-20 Data Gaps Initiative (DGI), which aimed at addressing the information needs that were revealed by the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, concluded its first phase and started a second phase (DGI-2) with the endorsement of G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in September...

This paper explores how monetary policy affects the real economy and its efficacy in promoting financial stability in a large low income country. This paper shows that monetary policy modestly impacts real economic activity and inflation via the bank lending and financial accelerator channels....

We examine the role of global and domestic shocks in driving macroeconomic fluctuations for Ghana. We are able to study the impact of exogenous shocks including productivity, credit supply, and commodity price shocks. We identify the shocks with a combination of sign and recursive restrictions...

After 25 years, the Colombian authorities decided to abandon the crawling peg exchange rate policy and implement a regime of nominal exchange rate bands. Initial conditions in Colombia contrast sharply with those of other cases in which bands were part of an ongoing effort to reduce high...