We revisit the link between bailouts and bank risk taking. The expectation of government support to failing banks creates moral hazard—increases bank risk taking. However, when a bank’s success depends on both its effort and the overall stability of the banking system, a government’s...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

The paper models an adjustable peg exchange rate arrangement as a policy rule with an escape clause under which the timing and magnitudes of realignments are the outcomes of policy optimization decisions. Under the assumptions that market participants are rational, risk averse, and fully...

This paper develops a model of devaluation crises for an economy where foreign exchange restrictions lead to the emergence of a parallel market. The devaluation rule relates the size of the parity change to the spread between the official and parallel exchange rates. The mechanism that triggers...

This paper compares two alternative dual exchange market regimes. In one of them, the official market clears through changes in international reserves, while in the other regime, the central bank implements a rationing scheme so as to keep international reserves constant. The paper discusses the...

It is often argued that the parallel market premium is a useful indicator of real exchange rate misalignment in developing countries. The empirical evidence does not, however, suggest the existence of a robust correlation between these two endogenous variables that is independent of the nature...

This paper presents a simple macroeconomic simulation model which can be used to evaluate alternative fiscal strategies and their implications for external viability. It attempts to bridge the gap between the literature on fiscal sustainability and the demands of operational work. The framework,...

This paper presents a general equilibrium model of interenterprise arrears, characterized by n-stage production technology with random productivity shocks. The model shows that large interenterprise arrears in transition economies may reflect substantial business risks in those countries and...

This paper examines the relationship between the long run rate of inflation and the allocation of transactions between markets in economies that operate dual exchange market regimes and ration foreign exchange in the official market. It shows that wider access of importers to the official...

Consensus forecasts are inefficient, over-weighting older information already in the public domain at the expense of new private information, when individual forecasters have different information sets. Using a cross-country panel of growth forecasts and new methodological insights, this paper...