Policies that distort domestic saving decisions have general equilibrium effects on trade flows and the real exchange rate. In particular increasing domestic savings keeps the real exchange rate undervalued depressing imports and increasing exports. However there are important differences between ...

The Book Series on “Central Banking, Analysis, and Economic Policies” of the Central Bank of Chile publishes new research on central banking and economics in general, with special emphasis on issues and fields that are relevant to economic policies in developing economies. The volumes are published ...

On 16 December 2008 the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) lowered the federal funds rate—its traditional monetary policy instrument—to essentially zero in response to the most severe U.S. financial crisis since the Great Depression. Because U.S. currency carries an interest ...

En este artículo analizo algunos aspectos de la experiencia del Banco Central en la etapa inicial de su autonomía y en especial durante el período 1989-1991 en que me correspondió presidirlo. Para ello utilizo un enfoque de economía política. Dos razones principales justifican esta opción. La primera ...

Monetary policy has come under strain since the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007–09. Once the GFC broke out central banks’ swift and determined response was essential to stabilise markets and to avoid a self-reinforcing downward spiral between the financial system and the real economy. But putting ...

Protectionist trade policies aim at shielding some sectors— typically but not exclusively manufacturing—from international competition. In doing so they may produce unintended consequences. In particular they tend to create some taxed sectors that use protected inputs usually in the agricultural sector ...

There is no consensus about the economic implications of real exchange rate (RER) misalignments. Some authors argue that keeping the real exchange rate away from its equilibrium level creates distortions in the relative prices of tradable and nontradable goods generating misleading signals to economic ...

One of the most popular pieces of wisdom in economic policy is the idea that fiscal policy is more effective in a fixed exchange rate regime or a currency union than in a flexible exchange rate regime. In this paper we revisit the theoretical foundations of the conventional wisdom on the relative ...

Banking went from being one of the most regulated sectors in the economy after the crisis in the 1930s to a more lightly regulated sector with the liberalization process that started in the 1970s in the United States. The previous period was marked by few crises with much more instability in the second ...

Understanding the determinants and patterns of international capital flows is of crucial importance for the design of policies that enhance macroeconomic stability. Traditionally capital flows have been very volatile in developing economies with large inflows in times of economic booms and large sudden ...