How did post-communist transformations affect people's perceptions of their economic and political systems? We model a pseudo-panel with 89 country-year clusters, based on the aggregation of about eighty thousand interviews conducted in 14 countries between 1991 and 2004, to identify the macro...

The Balassa–Samuelson (B–S) hypothesis suggests that, in catching-up countries, inflation will be comparatively higher, as prices of non-traded goods “catch up” with the growth of productivity in the tradable goods sector; as a result, these countries will experience real appreciation....

We propose an approach to identify independently the parameters describing the structure of the economy from those describing central bank preferences. We first estimate a parsimonious structural model for US inflation, US output-gap and the world commodity price index. We then proceed to the...