In early 1990, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Yugoslavia and Poland were experiencing extreme instability or, at least, the early stages of stabilization. Other countries, like Bolivia, had already run the course and stabilized or, like Mexico, had avoided the extreme experience and opted for...

The tradition in discussions of stabilization is to assume that fiscal austerity, competitive real exchange rates, sound financial markets and deregulation provide the preconditions for a resumption of growth. There is, however, a need to distinguish the necessary and the sufficient conditions....

The paper investigates four challenges to exchange rate stability in the coming years and explores their implications for macroeconomic and exchange rate policy. The first section explores the importance of seigniorage in financing the government budget in Southern European countries. The second...

This paper discusses a number of issues that the newly constituted board of the European Central Bank (ECB) will face early on. We show how conducting a European monetary policy is very different from living under the protective umbrella of the Bundesbank. We discuss voting on the ECB board, and...

When governments attempt stabilization why do they not undertake a programme certain to succeed? The paper discusses credibility when it is inconceivable that a programme will succeed with probability one. A cost-benefit analysis establishes an equilibrium programme that has some ex ante...

The monetary overhang, pervasive with price controls and shortages in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, offers close parallels to the post-1945 picture of Europe. At that time monetary reform was used in many countries, in one form or another, to bring liquid assets in line with the...

We propose a new theory of systemic risk based on Knightian uncertainty (or "ambiguity"). We show that, due to uncertainty aversion, beliefs on future asset returns are endogenous, and bad news on one asset class induces investors to be more pessimistic about other asset classes as well. This...

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, and after decades of relative neglect, the importance of the financial system and its episodic crises as drivers of macroeconomic outcomes has attracted fresh scrutiny from academics, policy makers, and practitioners. Theoretical advances are following a...

We analyze political selection in a closed list proportional system where parties have strong gate-keeping power, which they use as an instrument to pursue votes. Parties face a trade-off between selecting loyal candidates or experts, who are highly valued by the voters and thus increase the...

This paper synthesizes and extends the literature on the taxation of foreign source income in a framework that covers both greenfield and acquisition investment, and a general constraint linking investment at home and abroad for the multinational by introducing a cost of adjustment for the...