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Taxes and the labor market
One of the defining features of the financial crisis of 2008?09 has been its persistent impact on the U.S. labor market with the unemployment rate roughly doubling from early 2008 through mid2010. This has ignited an intense debate on the appropriate stimulus response of fiscal policy. The debate has ...
U.S. monetary spillovers to Latin America: the role of long-term interest rates
The economic situation in emerging markets has deteriorated in recent years. Perhaps the single most important event especially for Latin America has been the end of the so called commodity supercycle which intensified with the collapse in oil prices in late 2014. But the trend of weaker currencies ...
Monetary policy under financial turbulence: an overview
The financial crisis that started in 2007 brought the global economy to the brink and in many respects it is still unfolding especially in Europe. How to understand and deal with the crisis has naturally been the subject of fierce debates that continue today. However some consensus appears to be ...
Exchange rate interventions and insurance: is fear of floating a cause for concern?
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 ...
A decade of debt
Public debts in the advanced economies have surged in recent years to levels that have not been recorded since the end of World War II. Through 2010 the average public debt/GDP ratio for all the advanced economies has surpassed the pre-World War II peaks reached during the World War I and subsequently ...
Macroeconomic and financial stability: an overview
On September 2008 Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the world became aware that the financial crisis that had been unfolding for months was far more serious than expected. Months later it became clear that the financial crisis of 2008-2009 was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression ...
Transparency, flexibility, and inflation targeting
Three parallel and certainly not independent changes have occurred in central bank practices over the past fifteen years. The first is the spread of central bank independence, which is tied to the notion that even when the government plays a role in setting the goals of monetary policy, central banks ...
Monetary policy in Chile: a black box?
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 ...
Risks to central-bank independence
Central banking today faces a number of existential challenges. On the political side, and particularly after the financial crisis, the public has come to expect central banks to take on a dizzying array of responsibilities, some far beyond their power or remit. These include everything from enhanced ...
The relationship between exchange rates and inflation targeting revisited
For decades, the exchange rate was at the center of macroeconomic policy debates in emerging markets. Many countries used the nominal exchange rate to bring down inflation, –others—mostly in Latin America—used the exchange rate to implicitly tax the export sector. Currency crises were common and usually ...