If the Fed sneezes, who catches a cold?

This paper studies the international spillovers of US monetary policy shocks on a number of macroeconomic and financial variables in 36 advanced and emerging economies. In most countries, a surprise US monetary tightening leads to depreciation against the dollar; industrial production and real GDP fall, unemployment rises. Inflation declines especially in advanced economies. At the same time, there is significant heterogeneity across countries in the response of asset prices, and portfolio and banking cross-border flows. However, no clear-cut systematic relation emerges between country responses and likely relevant country characteristics, such as their income level, dollar exchange rate flexibility, financial openness, trade openness vs. the US, dollar exposure in foreign assets and liabilities, and incidence of commodity exports. 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A New Keynesian IS curve for Australia: is it forward looking or backward looking?

This article estimates the forward looking, backward looking and an extended version of the New Keynesian IS curve for Australia. The validity of these models is investigated by imposing the constraint on real rate of interest as well as when the constraint is relaxed. Two measures of output gap, namely GAP1 (constructed using the unobserved components approach) and GAP2 (constructed using a quadratic trend) are utilized. Our results suggest that the baseline backward looking and forward looking models are overwhelmingly rejected by the data. This evidence strongly supports the extended backward looking model (with GAP2) being relevant for monetary policy analysis

The surgical pathology laboratory in Mwanza, Tanzania: A survey on the reproducibility of diagnoses after the first years of autonomous activity

Background: In 2000, an Italian non-governmental organisation (NGO) began a 9-year project to establish a surgical pathology laboratory at the Bugando Medical Centre (BMC) in Mwanza, Tanzania, a country with a low Human Development Index (HDI), and as of 2009, the laboratory was operating autonomously. The present survey aims to evaluate the reproducibility of histological and cytological diagnoses assigned in the laboratory's early years of autonomous activity. We selected a random sample of 196 histological and cytological diagnoses issued in 2010-2011 at the BMC surgical pathology laboratory. The corresponding samples were sent to Italy for review by Italian senior pathologists, who were blinded to the local results. Samples were classified into four diagnostic categories: malignant, benign, inflammatory, and suspicious. The two-observer kappa-statistic for categorised (qualitative) data was then calculated to measure diagnostic concordance between the local Tanzanian pathologists and Italian senior pathologists. The k-Cohen was calculated for concordance in the overall study sample. Concordance and discordance rates were also stratified by subset: general adult, paediatric/adolescent, and lymphoproliferative histopathological diagnoses; fluid and fine needle aspiration (FNA) cytological diagnoses; and PAP tests. Discordance was also categorised by the corresponding hypothetical clinical implications: high, intermediate, and not significant. Results: Overall concordance was 85.2% (167 of 196 diagnoses), with a k-Cohen of 0.7691 (P = 0.0000). Very high concordance was observed in the subsets of adult general pathological diagnoses (90%) and paediatric/adolescent pathological diagnoses (91.18%). Concordance in the subset of PAP tests was 75%, and for fluid/FNA cytological diagnoses it was 56.52%. Concordance among 12 histological subtypes of lymphoma was 75.86%, with substantial discordance observed in the diagnosis of Burkitt lymphoma (five cases diagnosed by Italian pathologists versus 2 by local pathologists). The overall proportion of discordance with high hypothetical clinical implications was 6.1% (12 diagnoses). Conclusion: This blind review of diagnoses assigned in Tanzania, a country with low HDI, and in Italy, a country with a very high HDI, seemed to be a sensitive and effective method to identify areas of potential error and may represent a reference point for future, more detailed quality control processes or audits of surgical pathology services located in limited-resource regions

Data for: Our currency, your problem? The global effects of the euro debt crisis

Abstract of associated article: In this paper, I look at the global effects of the euro debt crisis, using an event study approach. After identifying a number of euro crisis events in the period that goes from 2010 to 2012, I analyse their impact on equity returns, exchange rates and government bond yields in 40 non-euro area countries. The main finding of this study is that euro debt crisis events have contributed to a rise in global risk aversion accompanied by a fall in equity returns, mainly in the financial sector. Moreover, I find that the effect on bond yields is not statistically significant for the whole set of countries, but it has a significant - though small - impact on countries with a high risk rating. Finally, the paper also focuses on transmission channels by looking at how pre-determined country characteristics influence the strength and direction of the contagion effect. I find that the most consistent conduits of contagion are: (i) trade exposure to the euro area, (ii) EU membership, and (iii) whether a currency is pegged to the euro