Several studies stressed that contrary to initial expectations, state-owned firms at the beginning of transition undertook painful measures to adjust to the new economic environment. This Paper investigates this behaviour in a simple game, a theoretic framework. It is argued that the massive...

High interest rates to defend the exchange rate signal that a government is committed to fixed exchange rates, but may also signal weak fundamentals. We test the effectiveness of the interest rate defense by disaggregating into the effects on future interest rates differentials, expectations of...

In this paper we analyse the role of asymmetric information between firms and consumers about market conditions. In standard models of oligopoly informational advantages of firms over customers do not play a role because all prices are observable. When customers are unable to observe all...

Within a simple model of monetary policy for an open economy, we study how foreign exchange intervention may be used to condition agents' beliefs of the objectives of the policymakers. Differently from cheap talk foreign exchange intervention guarantees a unique equilibrium. Foreign exchange...

Voting Theory generally concludes that, in first-past-the-post elections, all votes should go to effective candidates (Duverger’s Law), and parties should adopt a similar platform (Median Voter Theorem). Such predictions are not always met in practice, however. We show why divergence and vote...

This Paper compares the social efficiency of monetary targeting and inflation targeting when central banks may have private information on shocks to money demand and, because of verifiability problems, the transparency solution is not feasible. Under inflation targeting and monetary targeting,...