Recent changes to China's financial system, in particular ongoing interest rate liberalization, gradual movement toward a more flexible exchange rate regime, and rapid development of capital markets, have changed substantially the environment in which monetary policy operates. In light of these...

A puzzle in international macroeconomics is that observed real exchange rates are highly volatile. Standard international real business cycle (IRBC) models cannot reproduce this fact. We show that TFP processes for the U.S. and the ""rest of the world,"" is characterized by a vector error...

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. INFLATION AND MONETARY POLICY IN THE KYRGYZ REPUBLIC -- III. SEASONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CONSUMER PRICES -- IV. MODELING AND FORECASTING INFLATION -- V. CONCLUDING REMARKS -- References -- Appendix. Further Empirical Results.

This paper examines whether deviations from PPP are stationary in the presence of nonlinearity, and whether the adjustment toward PPP is symmetric from above and below. Using alternative nonlinear models, our results support mean reversion and asymmetric adjustment dynamics. We find differences...

Previous early-warning systems (EWSs) for currency crises have relied on models that require a priori dating of crises. This paper proposes an alternative EWS, based on a Markov-switching model, which identifies and characterizes crisis periods endogenously; this also allows the model to utilize...

After the large exchange rate depreciations following the 1997 East Asian crisis, export volumes from East Asian countries responded with a notable lag. Two main explanations for this lag have been proposed: that the policy of high interest rates limited access to domestic credit and hence...

The recent financial crisis raises important issues about the transmission of financial shocks across borders. In this paper, a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model is constructed to assess the relevance of international spillovers following a historical slowdown in U.S. equity prices. The...

This paper introduces a time-varying threshold autoregressive model (TVTAR), which is used to examine the persistence of deviations from PPP. We find support for the stationary TVTAR against the unit root hypothesis; however, for some developing countries, we do not reject the TVTAR with a unit...

Time series on economic activity in developing countries, in particular real GDP, are reported with important lags. Therefore, it is useful to construct indicators that coincide or lead the actual direction and level of economic activity. A general methodology to construct these indicators is...