This paper empirically tests the link between trade openness and enterprise restructuring in Bulgaria. It belongs to a recent line of work in the empirical trade literature that investigates the effects of trade policy on firm behaviour. The trade liberalization following the 1991 economic...

We use time-series methods to estimate a simple aggregate supply and demand model in order to analyse the comparative performance of fixed and flexible exchange rate systems and test competing hypotheses designed to explain shifts between exchange rate regimes. The paper provides a coherent...

Exchange rate regimes differ primarily by the activity of the exchange rate, not observable macroeconomic ‘fundamentals’. Fixed exchange rates are typically stable and floating exchange rates are volatile, but macro phenomena are regime-independent. Fundamentals only seem to be relevant for...

A common view in the literature is that the effect of energy price shocks on macroeconomic aggregates is asymmetric in energy price increases and decreases. We show that widely used asymmetric vector autoregressive models of the transmission of energy price shocks are misspecified, resulting in...

Business cycles reflect changes over time in the amount of trade between individuals. In this paper we show that incorporating explicitly intra-temporal gains from trade between individuals into a macroeconomic model can provide new insight into the potential mechanisms driving economic...

Several alterantive scenarios for the economic integration of East and West Germany are analysed. They all share an amphasis of the rile of migration and labor mobility in this process. The effects of congestion costs, rigid wages, human capital and heterogeneity of migrants, and endogenous...