International Reserves—Too Much of a Zipf’s Thing

Concentrated distribution of international reserves is puzzling. I show that the growth rates of international reserves bear only a very weak relationship to their initial stocks (scaled by GDP or in absolute terms), and that, by implication, the cross-sectional distribution of reserves conforms to...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sumlinski, Mariusz
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Washington, D.C. International Monetary Fund 2008
Series:IMF Working Papers
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: International Monetary Fund - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
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653 |a Population & demography 
653 |a Foreign exchange reserves 
653 |a Institutional Investors 
653 |a Stocks 
653 |a Pension Funds 
653 |a Demographic Economics: General 
653 |a Financial Instruments 
653 |a Reserve assets 
653 |a Population and demographics 
653 |a Reserves accumulation 
653 |a Non-bank Financial Institutions 
653 |a Demography 
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653 |a Investments: Stocks 
653 |a Population 
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520 |a Concentrated distribution of international reserves is puzzling. I show that the growth rates of international reserves bear only a very weak relationship to their initial stocks (scaled by GDP or in absolute terms), and that, by implication, the cross-sectional distribution of reserves conforms to Zipf's law. The law states that the size of reserves is inversely related to their ranking. Evidence in favor of the law is strong and time robust. I compare the crosssection distribution of international reserves embedded in the WEO projections to that implied by Zipf's law and find that international reserves are much less concentrated in the WEO projections than implied by Zipf's law