In this paper, I use a two-country model to investigate the incentives which lead one country to take charge of another country's debt. I show that, when direct transfers to residents cannot be perfectly targeted, the first country can be better o_ honoring the second country's liabilities, even...

Most European countries suffer from a structural weakness of employment and competitiveness. Can an optimal tax system reinforce European countries in this respect? If so, does this long-term policy act as a devaluation or a revaluation? In this paper, we show that fiscal devaluation can be an...

The surge in capital inflows towards emerging countries after 2009 has revived the debate about capital controls. This paper analyzes some of the international implications of restrictions on capital inflows. Focusing on a sample of Latin-American countries, we use detailed balance of payments...

The paper discusses the issue of estimating short- and long-run exchange rate pass-through to import prices in euro area countries and reviews some problems with the measures recently proposed in the literature. Theoretical considerations suggest a long-run Engle and Granger cointegrating...

We study the extent to which uncertainty in advanced country macroeconomic policy spills over to emerging markets via portfolio bond and equity flows. We find that increases in US policy uncertainty significantly reduce portfolio bond and equity flows into EMEs. Conversely, increases in EU...

Theory and evidence suggest that in an environment of well-anchored expectations, temporary economic news or shocks should not affect agents' expectations of inflation in the long term. Our estimated structural VARs show that both long- and short-term inflation expectations are sensitive to...

In order to assess the effect of fiscal rules in Stage Three of EMU for France and Germany, Bayoumi and Eichengreen's (1992) structural VAR analysis is extended by including the general government financial surplus and conditioning by external variables. This allows a distinction between fiscal...

Central banks should dispose of a precise measure of the structural inflation, i.e. the inflation adjusted from the economic cycle. This component of inflation, also called core inflation, is deduced from a structural VAR. Economists agree upon the long-term neutrality of inflation on...

We uncover technological standardization as a microeconomic mechanism which is vital for the implementation of new technologies, in particular general purpose technologies. The interdependencies of these technologies require common rules (“standardization”) to ensure compatibility. Using...

In this paper I shed light on the issues of the (low) volatilities of labor market variables implied by the search and matching model and the (high) values of the correlations between these variables and labor productivity. On the one hand, Shimer (2005) claims that “Not only there is little...