Extending recent theoretical contributions on sources of inflation inertia, we argue that monetary policy uncertainty helps determine the sluggish adjustment of expectations to nominal disturbances. Estimating a model in which rational individuals learn over time about shifts in US monetary...

We estimate tax multipliers in a "Blanchard-Yaari" consumption model where Ricardian equivalence is broken because the private sector discounts the future at a faster rate than the real rate of interest. The model fits U.S. data since 1955 extremely well-entailing a discount wedge of around 20...

The financial crisis that struck the global economy in late 2008 had its origins in excesses in the US housing market. Its reverberations, however, were felt around the world and nowhere more keenly than in Western Europe. While North Atlantic trade links were in relative stasis, the North...

This paper analyzes past and possible future spillovers from the Euro Area Sovereign Debt Crisis, both within the Euro Area and to the rest of the world. This analysis is based on a structural macroeconometric model of the world economy, disaggregated into fifteen national economies. We find...

This paper uses vector autoregressions to examine the monetary transmission mechanism in Japan. The empirical results indicate that both monetary policy and banks' balance sheets are important sources of shocks, that banks play a crucial role in transmitting monetary shocks to economic activity,...

We examine the mean-reverting properties of real exchange rates, by comparing the unit root properties of a group of international real exchange rates with two groups of intra-national real exchange rates. Strikingly, we find that while the international real rates taken as a group are...

Bilateral data on 420 merchandise trade flows between 21 industrial countries are used to estimate standard trade equations. The data set of over 11,000 observations allows the underlying elasticities to be estimated with considerable precision. Remarkably, a single specification appears to...

Data on output and prices for eleven EC member nations are analysed using a VAR decomposition to extract information on underlying aggregate supply and demand disturbances. The coherence of the underlying shocks across countries and the speed of adjustment to these shocks are compared with the...

A model of optimum currency areas is presented using a general equilibrium model with regionally differentiated goods. The choice of a currency union depends upon the size of the underlying disturbances, the correlation between these disturbances, the costs of transactions across currencies,...

This paper considers the impact on trade of preferential arrangements in Europe since the 1950s. Using a first difference version of the gravity model, we find that the EEC and EFTA altered the pattern of international trade. We also find evidence of trade diversion in several cases, notably...