La enorme expansión de los balances de los bancos centrales como reacción frente a las crisis recientes plantea importantes interrogantes sobre los efectos de las políticas de 'flexibilización cuantitativa', tanto en las condiciones financieras como en la demanda agregada (los efectos buscados por las ...

Since the mid-1970s, the macroeconomic consequences of wage indexation has been the subject of considerable research. Starting with an enthusiastic proposal for indexation by Friedman (1974) and two influential papers by Gray (1976) and Fischer (1977), the academic literature has examined the effects ...

For a Chilean capital market participant, it may be hard to imagine a world without the indexation unit, the Unidad de Fomento (UF). Most market participants would probably agree that the UF played a central role in the creation of a local capital market and also that it has had a positive impact on ...

Do better functioning financial intermediaries -financial intermediaries that are better at ameliorating information asymmetrics and facilitating transactions- exert a causal influence on economic growth? Providing evidence on causality has implications for policymakers and economists. For instance, ...

When inflation is chronic, firms develop indexation practices that automatically tie the growth of prices, wages, and other contracts to the performance of some comprehensive price index. The microeconomic advantages of indexation are evident and derive from the immunization of the relative price ...

Since the implementation of the Real Plan of 1994, the Brazilian economy has been in the process of reducing its degree of indexation. For more than three decades, Brazilian wages, rents, financial securities, and other contracts were indexed to the price level. The frequency of adjustment sometimes ...

The devaluation of the Thau bath in July 1997 triggered a major international financial crisis in East Asia, similar in many ways to the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s. The baht´s devaluation led to a Seriesos sharp devaluations in several other Asian countries, in particular Indonesia, ...

The debt crisis of the 1980s confirmed what most economists already knew well: the public sector cannot be trusted to make the rigth choices on behalf of society, especially in matters-such as foreign borrowing- whose ultimate costs may not be fully internalized by voters. The failure of the public ...

During the late 1980s, Japanese banks substantially increased their global presence. In part the expansion was undertaken to help service Japanese companies that were increasingly involved in foreign direct investment. However, this expansion also can be attibuted to Japan's positio as the world's ...

Does tight monetary policy stabilize the currency after a collapse?. Does the effect of high interest rates on the exchange rate depend on the condition of the banking system? The East Asian crises and other recent currency crises have put these questions at the center of economic policymaking decisions.

Fear of floating has recently come to be seen as one of the central de facto characteristics of exchange rate regimes in emerging markets, after first being identified by Calvo and Reinhart (2002). The interpretation of this phenomenon is still open to question. Does the optimal monetary regime for ...

During the 1990s the Chilean economy gradually cut its inflation rate from figures in the thirties to 4.7 percent in 1998. Central bank authorities have declared that the main objective of monetary policy is to reduce inflation to levels comparableto those in industrial countries. The desgnated ...

Monetary policy in South Africa's emerging market economy, given capital account liberalization and severe constraints on fiscal policy, has the major responsability for curbing inflation and currency instability while trying to ensure sufficient growth for longer-term political stability and the ...

Monetary policy regimes around the world changed dramatically over the decade of the 1990s. Central banks have become more transparent, more independent, more accountable, and (apparently) more successful. The biggest transformation has benn the move away from focusing on intermediate objectives, susch ...

With the end of intermediate exchange rate regimes, countries are either abandoning domestic monetary policy (by choosing super-hard pegs or relinquishing their national currencies altogether) or strengthening independent monetary policymaking (by adopting floating exchange rates, of either the clean ...

Disinflation in Israel has been a relatively slow process. It took more than a decade for the annual rate of inflation to fall from about 18 percent in the late 1980s to less than 4 percent in the late 1990s. For 2000 and 2001 the government has set an inflation target range of 3 to percent. Whether ...

One of the most serious problems that a central bank in an emerging market economy can face is the sudden reversal of capital inflows (or sudden stops). Hoarding international reserves can be used to smooth the impact of such reversals (see, for example, Lee, 2004), but these reserves are seldom ...

Las cuentas nacionales de Chile utilizan una base de precios fija para las valoraciones a precios constantes. En otras palabras, el volumen del producto para un año determinadose mide ponderando las cantidades del mismo año por los precios del año base (índice de Laspeyres). Así, por ejemplo, la serie ...

En los últimos años, la variación de existencias como fracción del PIB ha aumentado en forma significativa (ver gráficos 1 y 2), hasta alcanzar un valor récord de 2% a comienzos del año móvil 2005. A justes abruptos en esta variable se mencionaban como un factor de riesgo relevante en el Informe de ...

El trabajo muestra que las consideraciones de liquidez entregan un fundamento sencillo para la creación y destrucción de burbujas y los trastornos relacionados en el mercado de crédito, en particular la pérdida de valor de las garantías. Se presenta un marco en el que las perturbaciones del crédito ...