Release Date: March, 2012

Author/Editor: Jean-Louis Combes, Christian H Ebeke, Mireille Ntsama Etoundi, Thierry Yogo.

Release Date: March, 2012

This paper explores the role of foreign aid and remittance inflows in the mitigation of the effects of food price shocks. Using a large sample of developing countries and mobilising dynamic panel more...

Author/Editor: Reinout De Bock, Alexander Demyanets.

Release Date: March, 2012

This paper assesses the vulnerability of emerging markets and their banks to aggregate shocks. We find significant links between banks' asset quality, credit and macroeconomic aggregates. Lower more...

Author/Editor: Nkunde Mwase, Yongzheng Yang.

Release Date: March, 2012

Flows of development financing from the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) to low income countries (LICs) have surged in recent years. Unlike aid from traditional donors, BRICs (excluding more...

Author/Editor: Nan Geng, Papa N'Diaye.

Release Date: March, 2012

This paper analyzes the evolution of investment in China, its main features, and its key determinants. In recent years, manufacturing, real estate, and infrastructure have been the main drivers of more...

Author/Editor: Driton Qehaja.

Release Date: March, 2012

External shocks pose major challenges to fiscal policy makers through lower output and large fiscal imbalances. This paper analyzes the case of Moldova, which faced parallel crises a decade apart: more...

Release Date: February, 2012

Author/Editor: Santanu Chatterjee, Azer Mursagulov.

Release Date: February, 2012

Government spending on infrastructure has recently increased sharply in many emerging-market economies. This paper examines the mechanism through which public infrastructure spending affects the more...

Author/Editor: Reda Cherif, Fuad Hasanov.

Release Date: January, 2012

Policymakers in oil-exporting countries confront the question of how to allocate oil revenues among consumption, saving, and investment in the face of high income volatility. We study this allocation more...

Author/Editor: Pau Rabanal, Juan F. Rubio-Ramirez.

Release Date: January, 2012

Real exchange rates exhibit important low-frequency fluctuations. This makes the analysis of real exchange rates at all frequencies a more sound exercise than the typical business cycle one, which more...

Author/Editor: S. M. Ali Abbas, Alexander Klemm, Sukhmani Bedi, Junhyung Park.

Release Date: January, 2012

This paper assembles a new dataset on corporate income tax regimes in 50 emerging and developing economies over 1996-2007 and analyzes their impact on corporate tax revenues and domestic and foreign more...

Author/Editor: Sonali Das, Amadou N Sy.

Release Date: January, 2012

We study how investors account for the riskiness of banks' risk-weighted assets (RWA) by examining the determinants of stock returns and market measures of risk. We find that banks with higher RWA more...

Release Date: December, 2011

Author/Editor: Adolfo Barajas, Mario Catalan.

Release Date: December, 2011

We study the behavior of private pension funds as large depositors in a banking system. Using panel data analysis, we examine whether, and if so how, pension funds influence market discipline in more...

Author/Editor: Sebastian Sosa, Gustavo Adler.

Release Date: December, 2011

Commodity-exporting countries have significantly benefited from the commodity price boom of recent years. At the current juncture, however, uncertain global economic prospects have raised questions more...

Author/Editor: Jiri Podpiera.

Release Date: December, 2011

Emerging markets are particularly vulnerable to boom-bust credit cycles, due to excessive capital flows, shallow equity markets, and companies'' high leverage and open FX positions. While the policy more...

Author/Editor: Serhan Cevik.

Release Date: December, 2011

This paper investigates the empirical characteristics of business cycles and the extent of cyclical comovement in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, using various measures of more...

Author/Editor: Ruy Lama, Carlos Urrutia.

Release Date: December, 2011

We build a small open economy, real business cycle model with labor market frictions to evaluate the role of employment protection in shaping business cycles in emerging economies. The model features more...

Author/Editor: Oral Williams, Kamiar Mohaddes.

Release Date: December, 2011

This paper uses a pairwise approach to investigate the main factors that have been driving inflation differentials in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region for the past two decades. The results more...

Author/Editor: Deniz Igan, Heedon Kang.

Release Date: December, 2011

With another real estate boom-bust bringing woes to the world economy, a quest for a better policy toolkit to deal with these boom-busts has begun. Macroprudential measures could be in such a more...