This paper presents the DIGNAR (Debt, Investment, Growth, and Natural Resources) model, which can be used to analyze the debt sustainability and macroeconomic effects of public investment plans in resource-abundant developing countries. DIGNAR is a dynamic, stochastic model of a small open...

We examine the fertilizer retail-import price gap in 14 African countries between 2002 and 2013. This price differential is large and remains persistent even after accounting for changes in the cost of domestic transportation. We hypothesize that these persistent deviations may be indicative of...

In this paper we show that commodity price co-movements between petroleum and other commodities, although infrequent, are not unique to recent periods, as alluded to in the current literature. We find that much of the volatility in commodity prices over long time spans is caused by economic...

We develop a global vector autoregressive model (GVAR) to analyze the globalgrowth spillover e¤ects on Africa. The model contains 46 African countries and30 developed and emerging market countries, covering 90 percent of the world econ-omy. The results suggest that there is a signi…cant growth...

This paper presents a macroeconometric model of Rwanda. The modelis constructed to analyze the macroeconomic e¤ects of various policy interventions.It captures the supply constrained nature of the economy as well as its dependenceon the external sector. The individual equations of the model are...

In Africa, farmers have been reluctant to take up new varieties of staple crops developed to boost smallholder yields and rural incomes. Low fertilizer use is often mentioned as a proximate cause, but some believe the problem originates with incomplete input markets. As a remedy, African...

Using a closed economy model with a flexible-price good and a sticky-price good we study the conditions under which interest rate rules induce real determinacy and, more importantly, the MSV solution is learnable in the E-stability sense proposed by Evans and Honkapohja (2001). We show that...

We explore the stability properties of interest rate rules granting an explicit response to stock prices in a New-Keynesian DSGE model populated by Blanchard-Yaari non-Ricardian households. The constant turnover between long-time stock holders and asset-poor newcomers generates a financial...

The permanent income hypothesis implies that frictionless open economies with exhaustible natural resources should save abroad most of their resource windfalls and, therefore, feature current account surpluses. Resource-rich developing countries (RRDCs), on the other hand, face substantial...