The performance of macroeconomic indicators of capital mobility is examined in the context of an intertemporal equilibrium model of a small open economy. Recursive numerical solution methods are used to compute measures of consumption smoothing, savings-investment correlation, and the...

We consider how fear of model misspecification on the part of the planner and/or the households affects welfare gains from optimal macroprudential taxes in an economy with occasionally binding collateral constraints as in Bianchi (2011). On the one hand, there exist welfare gains from...

This paper proposes an integrated and risk-based approach to the sequencing and coordination of reforms to develop domestic financial markets. The paper argues that there is a hierarchy of financial markets that reflects the complexity of risks in each market and the interlinkages among markets....

We evaluate the direct employment effect of the public investment in key infrastructure-electricity, roads, schools and hospitals, and water and sanitation. Using rich firm-level panel data from 41 countries over 19 years, we estimate that USD 1 million of public spending in infrastructure...

Effective public investment requires governments to address the "recurrent cost problem" to ensure operations and maintenance (O&M) expenditures are sufficient to sustain the flow of productive public capital services to private factors of production. Building on the model of Buffie et al...

We create a network of bilateral correlations of changes in sovereign bond yields and individual bank equity price changes since 2000. We extract some stylized facts from this network of asset price correlations and document the clear differences in asset price correlations between safe havens...

We consider a moral hazard economy in banks and production to study how incentives for risk taking are affected by the quality of supervision. We show that low interest rates may generate excessive risk taking. Because of a pecuniary externality, the market equilibrium may not be optimal and...

The paper examines the joint impact of inflation targeting (IT) and fiscal rules (FR) on fiscal behavior and inflation in a broad panel of advanced and developing economies over the period 1990-2009. The main contribution of the paper is to show that, as suggested by the theoretical literature,...