Staff working papers

The intertemporal current account approach predicts that the current account of a small open economy is independent of global shocks, and that responses of the current account to country-specific shocks depend on the persistence of the shocks. The author shows that these predictions impose cross-equation restrictions (CERS) on a structural vector autoregression (SVAR).

The author presents a model of a twin crisis, in which foreign and domestic residents play a banking game. Both "honest" and run equilibria of the post-deposit subgame exist; some run equilibria lead to a currency crisis, as agents convert domestic currency to foreign currency.

The author explains how self-enforcing labour contracts can enhance the performance of macroeconomic models. He exposes the benefits of using these dynamic contracts to account for some puzzling macroeconomic facts regarding the dynamics and persistence of employment, consumption and output.

Using a closed-economy model, Jensen (2002) and Walsh (2003) have, respectively, shown that a policy regime that optimally targets nominal income growth (NIT) or the change in the output gap (SLT) outperforms a regime that targets inflation, because NIT and SLT induce more inertia in the actions of the central bank, effectively replicating the outcome obtained under precommitment. The author obtains a very different result when the analysis is extended to open-economy models.

The authors assess the stabilization properties of simple monetary policy rules within the context of a small open-economy model constructed around the limited-participation assumption and calibrated to salient features of the Canadian economy. By relying on limited participation as the main nominal friction that affects the artificial economy, the authors provide an important check of the robustness of the results obtained using alternative environments in the literature on monetary policy rules, most notably the now-standard "New Keynesian" paradigm that emphasizes rigidities in the price-setting mechanism.

The authors examine the investment behaviour of a sample of small, credit-constrained firms in Sri Lanka. Using a unique panel-data set, they analyze and compare the activities of two groups of small firms distinguished by their different access to financing; one group consists of firms with heavily subsidized loans from the World Bank, and the other consists of firms without such subsidies.

The authors build a theoretical model that generates demand for collateral by Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) participants under the assumption that they minimize the cost of holding and managing collateral for LVTS purposes. The model predicts that the optimal amount of collateral held by each LVTS participant depends on the opportunity cost of collateral, the transactions costs of acquiring assets used as collateral and transferring them in and out of the LVTS, and the distribution of an LVTS participant's payment flows in the LVTS.

This paper assesses analytically the ability of dynamic general-equilibrium sticky-price models to generate persistent real exchange rate fluctuations. It develops a tractable general-equilibrium model with Calvo-type price stickiness.

The author explores the role of governance mechanisms as a means of reducing financial fragility. First, he develops a simple theoretical general-equilibrium model in which instability arises due to an agency problem resulting from a conflict of interest between the borrower and lender.

Microfinance institutions now serve over 10 million poor households in the developing and developed world, and much of their success has been attributed to their innovative use of peer group lending. There is very little empirical evidence, however, to suggest that group lending schemes offer a superior institutional design over lending programs that serve individual borrowers.