Conference on International Macrofinance

• Pages: 12

Page 12

The International Monetary Fund and the World Economy and Finance Research Programme of the UK Economic and Social Research Council will hold a conference on international macrofinance at the IMF headquarters in Washington, DC, on April 24-25, 2008. The conference will provide a forum to present recent theoretical and empirical research narrowing the gap between "open-economy macro" and "finance" approaches to international financial issues.

While there is a very active literature on macrofinance linkages in the context of closed economies, applications to an open economy setting have just begun. International finance has traditionally relied on partial equilibrium analyses, while open-economy macroeconomics has avoided incorporating realistic financial features in its general equilibrium models because of the technical difficulties of doing so.

Recent methodological advances now permit researchers to embed more realistic financial market structure in open-economy models.

This conference aims to stimulate the innovation process and its diffusion to the analysis of relevant policy issues. Possible topics using this new approach include (but are not restricted to):

* Monetary policy and asset prices in an open economy

* Policies for managing capital flows

* Global liquidity and credit risk

* International risk-sharing and financial markets

* General equilibrium international...