IMF Staff Papers, Volume 48, No. 3


Book Description

This paper analyzes the financial implications of the 1956 crisis of nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egypt. It examines the regional distribution of public employment in Italy. The paper quantifies the impact of changes in the U.S. monetary policy on sovereign bond spreads in emerging market countries. Specifically, the paper explores empirically how country risk, as proxied by sovereign bond spreads, is influenced by U.S. monetary policy, country-specific fundamentals, and conditions in global capital markets. Modeling the IMF’s statistical discrepancy in the global current account is also discussed.




IMF Staff Papers, Volume 49, No. 3


Book Description

This paper empirically investigates the monetary impact of banking crises in Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, and Uruguay during 1975–98. Cointegration analysis and error correction modeling are used to research two issues: (i) whether money demand stability is threatened by banking crises; and (ii) whether crises lead to structural breaks in the relation between monetary indicators and prices. Overall, no systematic evidence that banking crises cause money demand instability is found. The paper also analyzes inflation targeting in the context of the IMF-supported adjustment programs.




IMF Staff Papers, Volume 48, No. 2


Book Description

This paper analyzes the link between product variety and economic growth. It finds support for the hypothesis that a greater degree of product variety relative to the United States helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The paper presents an empirical study for South Africa, which indicates that there exists a stable money demand type of relationship among domestic prices, broad money, real income, and interest rates, as well as a long-term relationship among domestic prices, foreign prices, and the nominal exchange rate.




IMF Staff Papers, Volume 56, No. 3


Book Description

Studies of the impact of trade openness on growth are based either on crosscountry analysis—which lacks transparency—or case studies—which lack statistical rigor. This paper applies a transparent econometric method drawn from the treatment evaluation literature (matching estimators) to make the comparison between treated (that is, open) and control (that is, closed) countries explicit while remaining within a statistical framework. Matching estimators highlight that common cross-country evidence is based on rather far-fetched country comparisons, which stem from the lack of common support of treated and control countries in the covariate space. The paper therefore advocates paying more attention to appropriate sample restriction in crosscountry macro research.




IMF Staff Papers, Volume 52, No. 3


Book Description

This last issue for 2005 comprises seven new papers, including a contribution to the journal's occasional Special Data Section about domestic debt markets in Sub-Saharan Africa, and also an in-depth look at the internal job market for entry-level economists at the IMF. The remaining articles cover toics as diverse as: modeling of asset markets, exchange rates in developing countries, international bank claims on Latin America, the effectiveness of "early warning" systems, and the use (by emerging market countries) of the IMF's Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS).




IMF Staff Papers, Volume 47, No. 3


Book Description

This paper provides an overview of the recent theoretical and empirical research on herd behavior in financial markets. It looks at what precisely is meant by herding, the causes of herd behavior, the success of existing studies in identifying the phenomenon, and the effect that herding has on financial markets. The paper also surveys a selected number of studies that evaluated the demand for money using the error-correction model approach in the 1990s across a range of industrial and developing countries.







IMF Staff Papers, Volume 53, No. 3


Book Description

This is the final issue for 2006 (Volume 53), and contains another paper in the occasional Special Data Section that seeks to measure financial development in the Middle East and North Africa by utilizing a new database. The issue also contains a comment from Jacques J. Polak on parity reversion in real exchange rates.




IMF Staff Papers, Volume 57, No. 2


Book Description

This paper introduces a new database of financial reforms covering 91 economies over 1973-2005. It describes the content of the database, the information sources utilized, and the coding rules used to create an index of financial reform. It also compares the database with other measures of financial liberalization, provides descriptive statistics, and discusses some possible applications. The database provides a multifaceted measure of reform, covering seven aspects of financial sector policy. Along each dimension the database provides a graded (rather than a binary) score, and allows for reversals.




IMF Staff Papers, Volume 57, No. 1


Book Description

Do highly indebted countries suffer from a debt overhang? Can debt relief foster their growth rates? To answer these important questions, this article looks at how the debt-growth relation varies with indebtedness levels, as well as with the quality of policies and institutions, in a panel of developing countries. The main findings are that, in countries with good policies and institutions, there is evidence of debt overhang when the net present value of debt rises above 20–25 percent of GDP; however, debt becomes irrelevant above 70–80 percent. In countries with bad policies and institutions, thresholds appear to be lower, but the evidence of debt overhang is weaker and we cannot rule out that debt is always irrelevant. Indeed, in such countries, as well as in countries with high indebtedness levels, investment does not depend on debt levels. The analysis suggests that not all countries are likely to profit from debt relief, and thus that a one-size-fits-all debt relief approach might not be the most appropriate one.