Search

This article uses the pooled mean group estimator and an extended annual dataset to examine the effectiveness of aid on growth. The results indicate a significant long-run impact of aid and ‘good’ policy on growth, but conditioning aid on ‘good’ policy reduces the long-run growth rate.

This paper explores the determinants of sovereign bond yields during the classical gold standard period (1872-1913). Using the Pooled Mean Group methodology, we find that the main benefit of the gold standard can be seen as a short-hand device that enhanced a country's reputation in international capital markets. By conveying important information to investors and enhancing the speed of adjustment of sovereign bond spreads to long-run equilibrium levels, the gold standard allowed country risk to be priced more effectively. In contrast to other studies, our results indicate that fundamental factors appear to be more important in determining a country's creditworthiness in the long-run than the exchange rate regime per se.

This paper examines whether better information about foreign shocks leads to welfare-improving monetary policy using a stylised two-country New Keynesian general equilibrium model. We demonstrate that when terms of trade externality exist and national central banks have the incentives to shift terms of trade in their own favour, the equilibrium under imperfect information may be welfare superior relative to an equilibrium with perfect information. In addition, the welfare gains or losses from information sharing between central banks are found to be small for empirically plausible range of parameters for risk aversion and elasticity of labour supply.

This paper studies the implications of adaptive learning in the modelling of inter-country linkages in a two-region MSG G-cubed model built on micro-founded behaviors of firms and households. The nature of the transmission process under rational expectations versus adaptive learning is explored. We investigate the propagation mechanism within and across borders for various shocks and policy changes within the United States: change in inflation target, fiscal policy, productivity shock, and rise in equity risk. Adaptive learning is found to change the short run sign of transmission in most cases but this also depends on the fraction of forward-looking agents in the economy.

This paper analyses the effects of inflation shocks, demands shocks, and aid shocks on low-income, quasi-emerging-market economies, and discusses how monetary policy can be used to manage these effects. We make use of a model developed for such economies by Adam et al. (2007). We examine the effects of four things which this model features, which we take to be typical of such economies. These are: the existance of a tradeables / non-tradeables production structure, the fact that international capital movements are - at least initially - confined to the effects of currency substitution of monetary policy, and the pursuit, in some countries, of a fixed exchange rate. We then modify the model to examine the effect on such economies of three major changes, changes which we make to be part of the transition by such economies towards more fully-interest-parity comes to hold, a move to floating exchange rates, and the replacement of fixed stocks of financial aggregates by the pursuit of a Taylor rule in the conduct of monetary policy.

This paper examines how the choice of exchange rate regime can signal financial rectitude and, in so doing, influence a country¡¦s ability to borrow internationally in domestic currency. We develop a model in which the constant probability of a ¡¥type change¡¦ creates incentives for disciplined policymakers to fix the exchange rate in an effort to separate themselves from more opportunistic types. Because the track record of a policymaker is imperfectly observable, reputational incentives depend on the past behaviour of previous generations and there is hysterisis in the updating behaviour of creditors. ¡¥Original sin¡¦ ¡V the inflationary track record of one¡¦s predecessors ¡V can reverberate over time leading creditors to be wary about extending sovereign loans in domestic currency terms. Our findings seem consistent with the pattern of the currency composition of debt in Japan and Russia at the turn of the nineteenth century.