Essentially, the impact of the currency union on member countries depends on whether the common currency area is optimal in the sense that the effect of the asymmetric shocks is small, Mundell (1961). Typically, researchers use VAR of different types to analyze the data. For robustness, we use...

The Economic Research Forum (ERF) produced a one-off survey of micro & small private enterprises (MSE) in a number of Middle East and North African countries (MENA). It contains sufficient information to fit a production function and additional information about the owner’s education type; the...

We show that the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) puzzle, whereby the half-life of the shock to the real exchange rate is long and unjustifiable by monetary and financial shocks, is a result of specification and estimation issues. We provide an alternative specification for PPP and show that the...