Colombia’s Central Bank Issues Call for Papers: Policy Lessons and Challenges for Emerging Economies in a Context of Global Uncertainty

The Banco de la República (Central Bank of Colombia), the Bilateral Assistance and Capacity Building for Central Banks Program (BCC) at the Graduate Institute, and the Swiss Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) are jointly organizing a conference on Policy Lessons and Challenges in Emerging Economies in a context of Global Uncertainty to be held in Cartagena (Colombia) on 3-4 October, 2016.

Unconventional monetary policies in developed economies have been adopted as transitory responses to the 2008 global financial crisis. The implementation of such policies in the United States was followed by an increase in global liquidity and asset prices. While many emerging economies recovered quickly from the financial shock, their currencies appreciated in real terms and their current accounts deficits widened. More recently, there has been a collapse in commodity prices, funding retrenchment and large depreciations, especially in Latin America. These sources of global financial shocks to small open economies pose serious challenges to central banks and other economic authorities in emerging economies.

These questions have been the subject of a growing body of economic research, spanning the fields of International Economics, International Finance, Monetary Economics to name a few. The purpose of the conference is to take stock of what we have learned after the global financial crisis and what the main policy lessons are for small open economies to deal with an unstable global environment.

The conference will bring together five leading economists (keynote speakers), a series of papers selected from this call for papers and other leading economists from policy and academic circles interested in discussing issues of critical importance for the design and conduct of future economic policy in emerging economies.

Professors Enrique G. Mendoza (University of Pennsilvania), Vincenzo Quadrini (University of Southern California), Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe (Columbia University), Martin Uribe (Columbia University) and Carlos Vegh (Johns Hopkins University) will be the keynote speakers, and the conference will be linked to a special issue of Banco de la República’s academic journal, Ensayos Sobre Política Económica (ESPE), published by Elsevier.

Guest Editors for this issue are: Professor Enrique G. Mendoza, Presidential Professor of Economics of the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Franz Hamann, Director of the Macroeconomic Models Department at the Banco de la República. This special issue will contain the invited papers from the guest leading economists and some of the papers selected for the conference, after the standard refereeing process.

Papers submitted must be original and not currently being considered for publication elsewhere. Authors of the selected papers (one presenter in the case of joint authors) will be invited to present his or her work at the conference. The deadline for submission of papers is May 16, 2016. Articles should be submitted via the Elsevier Editorial System at: https://ees.elsevier.com/espe/.

Documents are to be submitted in English, and should not exceed 50 pages including annexes, tables and graphs. Final decisions will be announced by August 5, 2016. This special issue of ESPE will be published during the first semester of 2017.