[...]The first intellectual development challenging the use ofan activist monetary policy to stimulate output and reduceunemployment is the finding, most forcefully articulatedby Milton Friedman, that the effects of monetary policyhave long and variable lags.1 The uncertainty of the timingand...

[...]In the case studies that follow, we will see that thedesign choices for an inflation-targeting regime fall intofour basic categories: definition and measurement of thetarget, transparency, flexibility, and timing.[...]

Many features of the German monetary targetingregime are also key elements of inflationtargeting in the other countries examined inthis study. Indeed, as pointed out in Bernanke and Mishkin(1997), Germany might best be thought of as a “hybrid”inflation targeter, in that it has more in common...

[...]This paper traces the evolution of Fedwire fromtwelve separate payment operations, linked only by aninterdistrict communications arrangement, to a more unifiedand efficient system. Our account highlights both thedifficulties the Federal Reserve encountered as it soughtto standardize and...

Standard models of international risk sharing with complete asset markets predict a positive association between relative consumption growth and real exchange-rate depreciations across countries. The striking lack of evidence for this link - the consumption/real-exchange-rate anomaly or...

There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutionsare fundamental for a country’s prosperity. The paper focuses on political events inItaly over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 hashelped insulate Italy’s financial...

This paper delineates the simultaneous impact of non-anticipated information onmean and variance of the intraday return process by including appropriate variablesaccounting for the news flow into both the mean and the variance function. This allowsus to differentiate between the consistent price...

By using official time series of the Italian evaded VAT base (Ministry of Finance) for the period 1980-2004 we investigate empirically the long-run characteristics of tax evasion and the relationship with the tax burden. We focus on three important issues not analyzed so far[...]