This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in Egypt during the period 1960-2001 within a trivariate VAR setting. We employ four different measures of financial development and apply Granger causality tests using the cointegration and vector...

This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in five Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries for different periods ranging from 1960 to 2004, within a trivariate vector autoregressive (VAR) framework. We employ four different measures of...

This paper compares the different dynamics of the simple sum monetary aggregates and the Divisia monetary aggregate indexes over time, over the business cycle, and across high and low inflation and interest rate phases. Although traditional comparisons of the series sometimes suggest that simple...

The current financial crisis followed the “great moderation,” according to which the world’s central banks had gotten so good at countercyclical policy that the business cycle no longer existed. As more and more economists and media people became convinced that the risk of recessions had...

The paper examines the export-led growth (ELG) hypothesis for nine Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries in three-variable vector autoregressive and error correction models. When considering total exports, our results reject the ELG hypothesis in almost all of these countries. When we...

This paper comprises a survey of a half century of research on international monetary aggregate data. We argue that since monetary assets began yielding interest, the simple sum monetary aggregates have had no foundations in economic theory and have sequentially produced one source of...

This paper explores the disconnect of Federal Reserve data from index number theory. A consequence could have been the decreased systemic-risk misperceptions that contributed to excess risk taking prior to the housing bust. We find that most recessions in the past 50 years were preceded by more...

This paper examines the suitability of the proposed monetary union among the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). To do so, we identify the underlying structural shocks that these economies are subject to and assess the extent to which the shocks are symmetric. Additionally, we test...