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 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 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 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 50 No 1 written by Mr.Robert P. Flood and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2003-04-17 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forty years ago, Marcus Fleming and Robert Mundell developed independent models of macroeconomic policy in open economies. Why do we link the two, and why do we call the result the Mundell-Fleming, rather than Fieming-Mundell model?
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 56 No 1 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This special issue brings together world-renowned experts to provide a systematic and critical analysis of the costs and benefits of financial globalization. Contributors include Kenneth Rogoff, Maurice Obstfeld, Dani Rodrik, and Frederic S. Mishkin.
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 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 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 51 No 1 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2004-04-20 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first issue of Volume 51 for 2004 includes a new paper by Peter B. Clark and Jacques J. Polak, along with a tribute from the Editor to Mr. Polak in honor of his 90th birthday. This issue also launches a new featured section, "Data Issues," which will be devoted in future issues to on-going discussions of the latest in econometric and statistical tools for economists, data puzzles, and other related topics of interest to researchers.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 56 No 3 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2009-07-31 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 51 Special Issue IMF Fourth Annual Research Conference written by Mr.Ashoka Mody and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2004-06-10 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the 2004 (Volume 51) Special Issue of IMF Staff Papers, which includes 6 selected papers (from more than 20) that were presented at the IMF's Fourth Annual Research Conference, November 6-7, 2003.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 57 No 1 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2010-03-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 52 No 1 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2005-04-18 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first issue of IMF Staff Papers for 2005 contains 7 papers that discuss: whether output recovered after the Asian crisis; the value of a country's trading partners to its own economic growth; whether interdependence is a factor in understanding the spread of currency crises; can remittance payments from expatriates be a reliable source of capital for economic development?; total factor productivity; designing a VAT for the energy trade in Russia and Ukraine; and lastly, a discussion of the reasons for central bank intervention in ERM-I since 1993
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 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.
