This paper presents a principal-agent model of IMF conditional lending, in the aftermath of a “capital-account” liquidity crisis. We show that traditional ex-post conditionality can be e¤ective in safeguarding the Fund’s resources, allowing for the provision of e¢cient emergency lending and reducing ine¢cient ex-ante credit rationing if the capital out‡ow which triggers the crisis is not excess...

In repeated games with di®erential information on one side, the labelling \general case" refers to games in which the action of the informed player is not known to the uninformed, who can only observe a signal which is the random outcome of his and his opponent's action. Here we consider the problem of minimizing regret (in the sense ̄rst formulated by Hannan [8]) when the information available...

This paper analyses whether New Zealand would be ready to form a currency or monetary union with either Australia, the 11 EU countries that are members of the EMU, Japan, or the US, if the criteria that have been put forward for the EMU are applied. The analysis is an empirical study with data from the mid 1980s to 1998, using cointegration techniques to search for co-movement and convergence i...

The European sovereign debt crisis revived the discussion concerning pros and cons of exchange rate adjustment in the face of asymmetric shocks. In the spirit of Keynes, exit from the euro area is to regain rapidly international competitiveness. In the spirit of Schumpeter, exchange rate stability with structural reforms would be beneficial towards the long-run growth performance. Previous lite...

With EU accession looming, a new chapter has been opened in the debate about the candidate countries’ exchange rate strategies. A heated discussion has arisen in relation to ERM2 membership. The experience of the present eurozone members with ERM/ERM2 membership shows that none of them faced a significant challenge in the two-year “evaluation” period in terms of the exchange rate stability conv...

Well over a trillion dollars worth of state-owned firms have been privatized since 1980. The traditional argument is that governments choose to privatize in response to fiscal pressures. In this study, the authors examine the impact of IFI conditionality on privatization and find that IMF conditionality, in particular, has an important indirect economic benefit. Investors are willing to pay mor...

A country’s rise to economic dominance tends to be accompanied by its currency becoming a reference point, with other currencies tracking it implicitly or explicitly. For a sample comprising emerging market economies, we show that in the last two years, the renminbi (RMB) has increasingly become a reference currency which we define as one which exhibits a high degree of co-movement (CMC) with o...

The Journal of Economic Literature codes classification system (JEL) published by the American Association (AEA) is de facto standard for research literature in economics. JEL used to classify articles, dissertations, books, book reviews, and working papers EconLit, a database maintained AEA. Over time, it has evolved extended with over 850 subclasses. This paper reviews history development sys...