FX Resilience around the World: Fighting Volatile Cross-Border Capital Flows

We show that capital flow (CF) volatility exerts an adverse effect on exchange rate (FX) volatility, regardless of whether capital controls have been put in place. However, this effect can be significantly moderated by certain macroeconomic fundamentals that reflect trade openness, foreign assets holdings, monetary policy easing, fiscal sustainability, and financial development. Passing the threshold levels of these macroeconomic fundamentals, the adverse effect of CF volatility may be negligible. We further construct an intuitive FX resilience measure, which provides an assessment of the strength of a country's exchange rates

Politics and Public Investment

Virtually all countries need additional infrastructure such as roads, bridges, airports, telecommunications networks, power plants, and public transportation. With interest rates low—and, as a result, cheap financing for government spending—many analysts and policy advisors advocate increasing public investment in infrastructure to promote growth, which would both lower the debt-to-GDP ratio and expand an economy’s long-term productive capacity (IMF, 2014). However, even if shovel-ready projects have been identified and decision-making processes for public investment are working efficiently, investment still may not happen. Why? Political considerations get in the way. When elections loom, policymakers choose to provide immediate benefits to the electorate through lower taxes or increased income transfers—at the expense of public investment, which takes time to come to fruition. Other factors can also play a role in discouraging needed investment. For example, the political orientation of parties that form a government may favor a lower level of public investment. When there are no political or institutional constraints, public investment should be determined mainly by development needs—to meet the requirements of a growing population and to reduce infrastructure bottlenecks. Occasionally, public investment can be triggered by demand management considerations— for example, when an economy has spare capacity and policymakers believe investment would increase aggregate demand and raise employment in the short term. In reality, however, political considerations often strongly influence public investment decisions

The CHD4-related syndrome: a comprehensive investigation of the clinical spectrum, genotype-phenotype correlations, and molecular basis

Sifrim-Hitz-Weiss syndrome (SIHIWES) is a recently described multisystemic neurodevelopmental disorder caused by de novo variants in CHD4. In this study, we investigated the clinical spectrum of the disorder, genotype-phenotype correlations, and the effect of different missense variants on CHD4 function