Following Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comments before Congress that the FOMC may ‘take a step down in the pace of asset purchases if economic improvement appears to be sustained’, US 10-year interest rates picked up sharply and gross capital flows to emerging market economies (EMEs) reversed....

This paper sets out to assess whether gross capital inflows to the Philippines are expansionary or contractionary in line with the model predictions and empirical findings of Blanchard et al. (2015). The results indicate that gross inflows are expansionary to output and credit growth. But...

Increasing capital inflows and sustained interest rate spreads were important features in East Asia prior to the crisis of 1997-98. But why did capital inflows fail to eliminate interest rate differentials? Why were inflows associated with rising domestic interest rates that then perpetuated the...

The rise in economic growth in some countries of Africa over past two decades, powered mainly by productivity boom, has been associated with large private capital inflows despite poor integration of the African countries with the world capital markets. While these countries lack access to world...

Beginning in 2009, in many advanced economies, policy rates reached their zero lower bound (ZLB). Almost at the same time, oil prices started rising again. We analyze how the ZLB affects the propagation of oil shocks. As these shocks move inflation and output in opposite directions, their...

This paper recognizes the importance of a large informal economy and interest rate fluctuations for business cycles in emerging countries. I document (1) a positive relationship between the relative volatility of consumption to output and the size of the informal economy, and (2) countercyclical...

We study a novel policy tool-interest rate uncertainty-that can be used to discourage inefficient capital inflows and to adjust the composition of external account between shortterm securities and foreign direct investment (FDI). We identify the trade-offs faced in navigating between external...

Understanding the transmission channels of shocks is critical for successful policy response. This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to assess the relative importance of the interest rate, the exchange rate and the credit channels in transmitting shocks in an open economy. The...

After 2007, countries that cut their policy interest rates close to zero turned, amongother policies, to forward guidance. We estimate a two-country model of the U.S. andCanada to quantify how unexpected changes in U.S. forward guidance affected Canada.Expansionary U.S. forward guidance shocks,...

This paper explores the implications of monetary policy rules in the general equilibrium two-country framework of Obstfeld and Rogoff (1995). It is argued that the sign of the correlation of domestic and foreign outputs can be positive after a monetary shock, contrary to the standard result. The...