In March of 2020, international markets seized up with a violence unequaled since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) nearly a dozen years before. As economies around the world locked down in the face of the potentially deadly but completely novel SARS-CoV-2 virus, stock markets fell, firms and governments ...

What is the optimal exchange rate policy? Should exchange rates be optimally pegged, managed, or allowed to freely float? What defines a freely floating exchange rate? Do open economies face a trilemma constraint in choosing between inflation and exchange rate stabilization, unlike divine coincidence ...

Cross-border corporate control is a major facet of globalisation. In roughly one out of four listed controlled companies in 2012, control was exercised by a foreign entity or family/individual. Controlling—and passive—ownership stakes are often hidden in complex structures, involving pyramids and ...

The Covid-19 pandemic triggered the most synchronous economic downturn in more than a century. Ninety percent of countries posted a decline in real per-capita GDP in 2020, a share that surpassed any other year since 1900, which includes two world wars and the Great Depression of the 1930s.1 The health ...

Among the factors behind international spillovers, U.S. monetary policy developments retain a major influence. Such developments drive the global financial cycle as strongly demonstrated by Rey (2013), Miranda-Agrippino and Rey (2020), Miranda-Agrippino and Rey (2021). The dramatic U.S. monetary ...

A common view held by academics as well as policymakers assigns an important role to global factors as drivers of fluctuations in economic activity in emerging market economies (EMEs). This follows naturally from the fact that these economies are often small and open to trade in global goods and capital ...

World commodity prices are known to display long cycles. These cycles have a periodicity of 20 to 30 years and are called commodityprice supercycles. Figure 1 displays the time paths of eleven commodity prices deflated by the U.S. consumer price index over the period 1960 to 2018. All commodity prices ...

The choice of sovereign-debt maturity in countries at risk of default represents a complex set of competing forces. The tradeoffs reflect the underlying frictions present in international sovereign-debt markets. The primary frictions are the lack of state contingency in debt contracts and the inability ...

Policymakers faced with volatile capital flows may desire a method to identify the level of flows likely to persist in the medium run. In a series of papers (Burger, Warnock, and Warnock, henceforth BWW, 2018, 2022), we have developed an estimate of the natural or equilibrium level of capital flows ...

A central focus of monetary policy is the underlying rate of inflation that might be expected to prevail over a horizon of one or two years. Because inflation is estimated from noisy data, the estimation of this underlying rate of inflation, which we refer to as trend inflation, requires statistical ...