Bank Excess Reserves in Emerging Economies: A Critical Review and Research Agenda

This paper reviews academic studies of excess reserves in the banking system of emerging economies from 2000 through 2014. While excess reserves in emerging countries have attracted increasing attention from scholars, virtually no work has reviewed and synthesised the extant knowledge. This paper takes the necessary step of consolidating and integrating the past literature on emerging country excess reserves. Focusing on articles published in major scholarly journals, we classify the existing literature on excess reserves into three broad taxonomies, namely excess liquidity sources, excess liquidity’s effects, and the response policies of central banks of emerging countries. Achievements within each of the three research areas are reviewed, critical gaps identified, and recommendations for future research provided.