Even after one of the most severe multi-year crises on record in the advanced economies, the received wisdom in policy circles clings to the notion that high-income countries are completely different from their emerging market counterparts. The current phase of the official policy approach is...

This paper provides new estimates of the housing stock, construction rates and price developments by city tier in China in order to understand where imbalances might be concentrated, and the implications of any significant contraction. We also update estimates of the size of China’s rapidly...

The last decade or so has seen a mushrooming of new sovereign debt databases covering long time spans for several countries. This represents an important breakthrough for economists who have long sought to, but been unable to tackle, first-order questions such as why countries have differential...

This paper describes the evolution of ideas to apply bankruptcy reorganization principles to sovereign debt crises. Our focus is on policy proposals between the late 1970s and Anne Krueger`s (2001) proposed Sovereign Debt-Restructuring Mechanism, with brief reference to the economics literature...

This paper examines the claim that exchange rate regimes are of little salience in thetransmission of global financial conditions to domestic financial and macroeconomicconditions by focusing on a sample of about 40 emerging market countries over 1986-2013.Our findings show that exchange rate...

For about three decades until the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), Covered Interest Parity (CIP) appeared to hold quite closely-even as a broad macroeconomic relationship applying to daily or weekly data. Not only have CIP deviations significantly increased since the GFC, but potential macro...

A cross-country comparative analysis shows that there is substantial room for further integration of China into global financial markets, especially in the case of the international bond market. A further successful liberalization of the Chinese bond market would encompass not only loosening...

Routine publication of the forecast path for the policy interest rate (i.e. 'conventional forward guidance') would improve the transparency of monetary policy. It would also improve policy effectiveness through its influence on expectations, particularly when there is a risk of low inflation,...