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This paper surveys recent economic developments in countries in the African Department. In the aggregate, output growth continues to be sluggish, and it is expected that half of the countries will experience a declining income per capita in 1993. However, structural adjustment is making fast progress, especially as regards the liberalization of exchange and credit markets. This bodes well for an eventual improvement in economic performance.
Banks and Banking --- Exports and Imports --- Foreign Exchange --- Trade: General --- Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects --- Currency --- Foreign exchange --- International economics --- Finance --- Exchange rate arrangements --- Exports --- Real interest rates --- International trade --- Financial services --- Interest rates --- Cameroon
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Program conditionality and ownership are important considerations in the IMF's current rethinking of program design. This paper contributes to the literature by developing a theory of program conditionality and ownership on the basis of Cumulative Prospect Theory. The policymaker may value a set of programs, each with fewer conditions, more than an extended program with as many conditions. This valuation bias is greater in ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) than under uncertainty. If greater valuation of a program engenders more explicit and implicit ownership, then programs with fewer conditions may have a better chance of success. Less is more.
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It has recently been suggested that allowing for switches between different inflationary regimes produces a much better fit for the Fisher relationship between interest rates and inflation, at least for U.S. data. The paper assesses the merits of the regime-switching theory as an explanation for the apparent fluctuations in real interest rates in Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Banks and Banking --- Inflation --- Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects --- Price Level --- Deflation --- Finance --- Macroeconomics --- Real interest rates --- Long term interest rates --- Short term interest rates --- Yield curve --- Financial services --- Prices --- Interest rates --- United States
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This paper provides a monetary model with nominal rigidities that differs from the conventional New Keynesian model with firms setting pricing policies instead of price levels. In response to permanent or highly persistent monetary policy shocks this model generates the empirically observed slow (inertial) and prolonged (persistent) reaction of the inflation rate, and also the recession that typically accompanies moderate disinflations. The reason is that firms respond to such shocks mostly through a change in the long-run or inflation updating component of their pricing policies. With staggered pricing policies there is a time lag before this is reflected in aggregate inflation.
Banks and Banking --- Inflation --- Macroeconomics --- Price Level --- Deflation --- Monetary Policy --- Open Economy Macroeconomics --- Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects --- Finance --- Disinflation --- Real interest rates --- Inflation persistence --- Sticky prices --- Prices --- Interest rates --- United States
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There is strong evidence that interest rates and bond yield movements exhibit both stochastic volatility and unanticipated jumps. The presence of frequent jumps makes it natural to ask whether there is a premium for jump risk embedded in observed bond yields. This paper identifies a class of jump-diffusion models that are successful in approximating the term structure of interest rates of emerging markets. The parameters of the term structure of interest rates are reconciled with the associated bond yields by estimating the volatility and jump risk premia in highly volatile markets. Using the simulated method of moments (SMM), results suggest that all variants of models which do not take into account stochastic volatility and unanticipated jumps cannot generate the non-normalities consistent with the observed interest rates. Jumps occur (8,10) times a year in Argentina and Brazil, respectively. The size and variance of these jumps is also of statistical significance.
Banks and Banking --- Macroeconomics --- Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects --- Price Level --- Inflation --- Deflation --- Finance --- Yield curve --- Short term interest rates --- Interest rate modelling --- Asset prices --- Market interest rates --- Interest rates --- Prices --- Argentina
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The paper develops robust measures of core inflation for Vietnam that can be used in policy making. These core inflation measures (CIMs) are based on an analytical evaluation of the inflation process in Vietnam, and use a filtering approach to narrow down potential measures that satisfy certain empirically desirable criteria. The paper finds that commonly used exclusion-based measures (EBMs) do not perform well against these empirical criteria; trimmed mean measures (TMMs) do better. Among TMMs, “one trim does not fit all periods”; periods of high and variable inflation require larger trims, and conversely. EVIEWS and MATLAB programs which accompany the paper allow quick, timely replication of CIMs as new data become available, making them valuable tools for the State Bank of Vietnam on an ongoing basis.
Banks and Banking --- Inflation --- Macroeconomics --- Estimation --- Price Level --- Deflation --- Monetary Policy --- Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects --- Banking --- Consumer price indexes --- Price controls --- Central bank policy rate --- Prices --- Financial services --- Price indexes --- Government policy --- Interest rates --- Vietnam
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We analyze the profitability of FX swaps used by the central bank of Brazil to shed light on the rationale for FX intervention. We find that swaps are profitable in expectation, suggesting that FX intervention is used to stabilize the exchange rate in the face of temporary excessive movements rather than to manipulate it away from fundamental values. In line with this interpretation, we find that the scale of FX intervention responds to the degree of exchange rate misalignment relative to UIP conditions. We also document that intervention is more aggressive when there is less uncertainty about the medium-term level of the exchange rate and when the exchange rate is overvalued rather than undervalued.
Banks and Banking --- Foreign Exchange --- Central Banks and Their Policies --- Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects --- Currency --- Foreign exchange --- Finance --- Exchange rates --- Currency swaps --- Interest rate parity --- Exchange rate forecasting --- Financial services --- Interest rates --- Brazil
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This is the fourth of a series of papers that are being written as part of a larger project to estimate a small quarterly Global Projection Model (GPM). The GPM project is designed to improve the toolkit to which economists have access for studying both own-country and cross-country linkages. In this paper, we add Latin American economies to a previously estimated small quarterly projection model of the US, Euro Area, and Japanese economies. The model is estimated with Bayesian techniques, which provide a very efficient way of imposing restrictions to produce both plausible dynamics and sensible forecasting properties.
Commerce --- Business & Economics --- International Commerce --- Globalization --- Econometrics. --- Economic aspects --- Economics, Mathematical --- Statistics --- Banks and Banking --- Foreign Exchange --- Inflation --- Production and Operations Management --- Macroeconomics: Production --- Price Level --- Deflation --- Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects --- Macroeconomics --- Currency --- Foreign exchange --- Finance --- Output gap --- Real exchange rates --- Real interest rates --- Exchange rates --- Production --- Economic theory --- Prices --- Interest rates --- United States
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This paper estimates the evolution of equilibrium real home prices in the United States and finds that despite recent declines, single-family homes remained 8 to 20 percent overvalued as of the first quarter of 2008. In the short run, the gap between actual and equilibrium prices does not exert powerful influence over price dynamics. Instead, that dynamics is driven by the inventory-to-sales ratio and by foreclosure starts in a highly inertial relationship. Taken together, this implies that price declines are likely to continue, including past the point where overvaluation is eliminated. The paper also finds that from the early 1990s onwards changes in regional home prices have been more synchronized than before, and that the recent movements in the average price index have reflected a nationwide housing boom, followed by a nationwide housing bust.
Housing --- Prices --- Banks and Banking --- Infrastructure --- Labor --- Macroeconomics --- Real Estate --- Housing Supply and Markets --- Price Level --- Inflation --- Deflation --- Economic Development: Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis --- Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects --- Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search --- Property & real estate --- Finance --- Labour --- income economics --- Housing prices --- Asset prices --- Real interest rates --- Unemployment rate --- Saving and investment --- Interest rates --- Unemployment --- United States
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We develop a optimal rules-based interpretation of the 'three pillars macroeconomic policy framework': a combination of a freely floating exchange rate, an explicit target for inflation, and a mechanism than ensures a stable government debt-GDP ratio around a specified long run. We show how such monetary-fiscal rules need to be adjusted to accommodate specific features of emerging market economies. The model takes the form of two-blocs, a DSGE emerging small open economy interacting with the rest of the world and features, in particular, financial frictions It is calibrated using Chile and US data. Alongside the optimal Ramsey policy benchmark, we model the three pillars as simple monetary and fiscal rules including and both domestic and CPI inflation targeting interest rate rules alongside a 'Structural Surplus Fiscal Rule' as followed recently in Chile. A comparison with a fixed exchange rate regime is made. We find that domestic inflation targeting is superior to partially or implicitly (through a CPI inflation target) or fully attempting to stabilizing the exchange rate. Financial frictions require fiscal policy to play a bigger role and lead to an increase in the costs associated with simple rules as opposed to the fully optimal policy.
Finance --- Business & Economics --- Money --- Monetary policy --- Fiscal policy --- Banks and Banking --- Macroeconomics --- Money and Monetary Policy --- Public Finance --- Fiscal Policy --- Macroeconomics: Consumption --- Saving --- Wealth --- Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects --- Monetary Systems --- Standards --- Regimes --- Government and the Monetary System --- Payment Systems --- Monetary economics --- Consumption --- Fiscal rules --- Zero lower bound --- Currencies --- Economics --- Interest rates --- Chile
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