The provision of foreign exchange liquidity by emerging market central banks during the global shock of 2008-09 departs from the domestic liquidity lender of last resort role described by Bagehot in his classic ""Lombard Street."" This paper documents and analyzes the foreign exchange liquidity...

Unconventional central bank measures are playing a key policy role for many advanced economies in the 2007-09 global crisis. Are they playing a similar role for emerging economies? Emerging economies have widely used unconventional foreign exchange and domestic short-term liquidity easing...

A new aggregation scheme used to measure the sources of fiscal financing of indebted countries suggests that there was a fundamental improvement in the seniority of domestic debt at the expense of foreign bank debt during the late 1980s. We argue that this was the revenue maximizing response of...

Inflation targeting lite (ITL) countries float their exchange rate and announce an inflation target, but are not able to maintain the inflation target as the foremost policy objective. This paper identifies 19 emerging market countries as practitioners of ITL. They seem to focus mainly on...

This paper examines the international experience with full-fledged inflation targeting monetary regimes. Stylized facts are brought together from a review of the institutional elements of inflation targeting frameworks, a comparison of actual and targeted inflation outcomes, and case studies of...

The experience of full-fledged inflation targeting (FFIT) countries is used here to shed light on the costs and benefits of greater monetary policy transparency for the G3. For the United States and the euro area, a hypothetical adoption of FFIT would incur a cost of less discretion while...

This note examines the impact of measurable and unmeasurable (not correlated with observed aggregates) information on secondary market LDC loan prices. The Institutional Investor country risk ratings are used to construct a proxy for the non-quantifiable information that moves debt market...

This paper uses flow-of-funds and balance sheet data to analyze the impact of financial crises on corporate financing and GDP in a range of countries. Post-crisis GDP contractions are mainly accounted for by declines in investment and inventory and are more severe for emerging market countries....

Different levels of corporate leverage are used in this paper to help explain the wide range of post-crisis output adjustment across East Asia. In the model developed here, highly leveraged firms facing a cutoff of capital inflows are threatened by bankruptcy. These firms respond by eliminating...

This paper classifies countries that define their monetary policy framework by an inflation target into full-fledged inflation targeters, eclectic inflation targeters and inflation targeting lite regimes. This classification is based on indicators of the clarity and credibility of the commitment...