Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 47 No 2 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes portfolio diversification, leverage, and financial contagion. It studies the extent to which basic principles of portfolio diversification explain “contagious selling” of financial assets when there are purely local shocks. The paper demonstrates that the elementary portfolio theory offers key insights into “contagion.” Most important, portfolio diversification and leverage are sufficient to explain why an investor will find it optimal to significantly reduce all risky asset positions when an adverse shock impacts just one asset.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 47 No 3 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2001-10-10 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 47 No 1 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper discusses the origins of the pyramid schemes and the way the authorities handled them. The paper analyzes the economic effects of the pyramid schemes, concluding that despite the descent into anarchy triggered by the schemes’ collapse, their direct effects on the economy are difficult to specify and appear to have been limited. The paper also argues that prevention of pyramid schemes is better than cure and that government and international financial institutions should be vigilant in clamping down on frauds.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WILLIAM. white, who joined the International Monetary Fund in 1948, spent his entire professional life in the Research Department. Present and past staff members, many of whom benefited from his advice, have asked that his contribution-to the work of the Fund should receive recognition in Staff Papers. This appreciation draws on excerpts from written recollections of some of his colleagues.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 47 Special Issue IMF Annual Research Conference written by Mr.Robert P. Flood and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2001-11-28 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper presents a broad overview of postwar analytical thinking on international macroeconomics, culminating in a more detailed discussion of recent progress. The paper reviews important empirical evidence that has inspired alternative modeling approaches, as well as theoretical and policy considerations behind developments in the field. The paper presents an empirical study of fiscal policy in countries with extreme monetary regimes. It also examines members of multilateral currency unions, dollarized countries that officially use the money of another country, and countries using currency boards.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 48 No 2 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2001-12-12 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 50 No 2 written by Mr.Robert P. Flood and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2003-07-11 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines sources of economic growth in East Asia. The conventional growth-accounting approach to estimating the sources of economic growth requires unrealistically strong assumptions about either competitiveness of factor markets or the form of the underlying aggregate production function. The paper outlines a new approach utilizing nonparametric derivative estimation techniques that does not require imposing these restrictive assumptions. The results for East Asian countries show that output elasticities of capital and labor tend to be different from the income shares of these factors. The paper also explores the compensating potential of private intergenerational transfers.
Download or read book Staff Papers April 1960 written by International Monetary Fund and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 52 No 3 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2005-12-22 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 49 No 2 written by Mr.Robert P. Flood and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2002-07-11 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper explores sources of the output collapse in Russia during transition. A modified growth-accounting framework is developed that takes into account changes in factor utilization that are typical of the transition process. The results indicate that declines in factor inputs and productivity were both important determinants of the output fall. The paper analyzes the behavior of real commodity prices over the 1862–1999 progress. It also examines whether average stocks of health and education are converging across countries, and calculates the speed of their convergence using data from 84 countries for 1970–90.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1975-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper it is argued that in a system of widespread managed floating, as in a par value system with occasional floating, the problem of asymmetry of adjustment between the issuers of the principal intervention currencies and other countries and the problem of ensuring an effective international management of reserves remain to be solved. If the latter problem is less acute under a floating system, the former problem is potentially more acute than under par values. Although widespread floating would appear to offer no obstacle to the operation of a substitution account, its effect on the acceptability of asset settlement is debatable and it would add considerably to the difficulties of organizing multicurrency intervention. If politically acceptable, a system of guided intervention oriented to an established system of normal exchange rate zones would probably be superior to any other arrangement under floating for the purpose of promoting symmetry in adjustment, while permitting an adequate degree of exchange rate management and avoiding the anomaly of mutually offsetting intervention.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 51 No 2 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2004-07-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second issue for 2004 contains 8 new papers, including notable contributions from: Nancy Brune, Geoffrey Garrett, and Bruce Kogut on the global spread of privatization; and Mark P. Taylor and Elena T. Branson on asymmetric arbitrage and default premiums in the U.S. and Russian markets. Other papers in the issue look at German wage structures, contagion in equity markets, export orientation and productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa, the role of higher vs. basic education in economic development, and issues related to capital account liberalization.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 52 No 2 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2005-08-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines contractionary currency crashes in developing countries. It explores the causes of India’s productivity surge around 1980, more than a decade before serious economic reforms were initiated. The paper finds evidence that the trigger may have been an attitudinal shift by the government in the early 1980s that, unlike the reforms of the 1990s, was pro-business rather than pro-market in character, favoring the interests of existing businesses rather than new entrants or consumers. A relatively small shift elicited a large productivity response, because India was far away from its income possibility frontier.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers Volume 43 No 1 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper extends a standard growth model and obtains consistent panel data estimates of the growth retarding effects of military spending via its adverse impact on capital formation and resource allocation. Simulation experiments suggest that a substantial long-term “peace dividend”—in the form of higher capacity output—may result from markedly lower military expenditure levels achieved in most regions during the late 1980s, and the further military spending cuts that would be possible if global peace could be secured.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 56 No 4 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2009-11-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper empirically evaluates four types of costs that may result from an international sovereign default: reputational costs, international trade exclusion costs, costs to the domestic economy through the financial system, and political costs to the authorities. It finds that the economic costs are generally significant but short-lived, and sometimes do not operate through conventional channels. The political consequences of a debt crisis, by contrast, seem to be particularly dire for incumbent governments and finance ministers, broadly in line with what happens in currency crises.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 57 No 2 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2010-06-29 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1993 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper discusses how three countries in Europe—Austria, Turkey, and Finland—emerged from a prolonged inflation, restored viable economies, and resumed economic growth in the 1950s. It also attempts to draw some conclusions based on their experience as well as the experience of some other countries. In mid-1949 the Austrian Government requested assistance from the IMF in the formulation of measures that could lead the economy out of the accelerating price-wage spiral. The key issue was to find a policy mix which would lessen the burden on the budget but would help to maintain full employment. Representatives of industry agreed to the stabilization program only after they were persuaded that it was only through the program that industries could hope to maintain the prosperity that they had enjoyed in the early post-war years. They also realized that it was only thus that they could be freed of detailed government regulations which had become onerous.
