Rapid credit growth in Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine has been driven by successful macroeconomic stabilization, robust growth, and capital inflows. While financial deepening is both expected and welcome, the recent expansions appear to have been excessive, as evidenced by widening current...

This paper discusses how the choice of central banks' operating targets influences the use of their monetary policy instruments and how the latter affect the central bank's balance sheet. This is of particular interest, since the monetary conditionality in IMF-supported programs has...

This paper provides some practical advice on establishing initial conditions in support of an inflation-targeting monetary framework. These conditions are divided into four areas: a mandate in support of an inflation objective and accountability for achieving this objective; macroeconomic...

We study the coagglomeration of domestic plants and foreign multinationals and the impact of this on domestic plant growth using data for Irish manufacturing. To this end we make use of the index developed by Ellison and Glaeser (1997) and find coagglomeration to be important for a number of...

We examine the role of trends in rainfall in the poor growth performance of sub-Saharan African nations relative to other developing countries. To do so we use a new crosscountry panel climatic data set in an empirical economic growth framework. Our results show that rainfall has been a...

This paper develops a new framework for the process of money supply. In contrast to models like McCallum (1989) based on the money multiplier analysis or the credit market models of Brunner and Meltzer (1966, 1973) our model explicitly illustrates the interaction of non-banks, banks and the...