Particularly in the 1990s economists in America have been surprised by how good or how lucky has been our macro performance compared to our peers abroad. We pinch ourselves and ask: "What went right?" And, by implication, authorities in Europe must be looking in their mirror and wondering:...

This paper considers the problem of testing for the presence of stochastic trends in multivariate time series with structural breaks. The breakpoints are assumed to be known. The testing framework is the multivariate Locally Best Invariant test and the common trend test of Nyblom and Harvey.

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic consequences of the establishment of a monetary union in the presence of unionized labor markets. It is shown that the effects of the formation of a monetary union depend on several labor market festures, such as the degree of centralization of wage...

We survey the existing work on the cross-country differences in the transmission of European monetary policy. We find that prior work, focusing on macroeconomic data, does not clearly answer the question posed in the title and offer some explanations for the ambiguity.

We consider an economy in which the oil costs, industrial production, and other macroeconomic variables fluctuate in response to fundamental domestic and external demand and supply shocks. We estimate the effects of these structural shocks on US monthly data for the 1973.1-2007.12 period using...

We present a new indicator of house prices in Italy, with more extensive geographical and time coverage. The new indicator now makes it possible to analyze medium- and long-term trends with satisfactory representation of the Italian housing market. It also allows for timely updating, for prompt...