We propose a comprehensive methodology to characterize the business cycle comovements across European economies and some industrialized countries, always trying to ‘let the data speak’. Out of this framework, we propose a novel method to show that there is no ‘Euro economy’ that acts as...

This paper uses a two country DSGE model to examine the effects of tax-based versus expenditure-based fiscal consolidation in a currency union. We find three key results. First, given limited scope for monetary accommodation, tax-based consolidation tends to have smaller adverse effects on...

I revisit the potential costs and benefits for Sweden of joining the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of the European Union. I first show that the Swedish business cycle since the mid-1990s has been closely correlated with the Euro area economies, suggesting that common shocks have been an...

The half-life of deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) plays a central role in the ongoing debate about the ability of macroeconomic models to account for the time series behaviour of the real exchange rate. The main contribution of this paper is a general framework in which alternative...

South Africa in the 1990s became globally more integrated after years of isolation. Opening the trade and capital accounts gave impetus to a monetary policy regime change to inflation targeting from 2000, after a costly transitional period of monetary mismanagement with low policy transparency....

It is difficult to obtain reliable measures of evolving openness to trade, despite its relevance to models of growth, inflation and exchange rates. Our innovative technique measures trade openness encompassing both observable trade policy (tariffs and surcharges) and unobservable trade policy...

I examine the effectiveness of exchange rate intervention within the context of a Markov-switching model for the real exchange rate. The probability of switching between stable and unstable regimes depends non-linearly upon the amount of intervention, the degree of misalignment and the duration...

This paper proposes a novel international transmission mechanism based on the assumption of deep habits. The term deep habits stands for a preference specification according to which consumers form habits on a good-by-good basis. Under deep habits, firms face more elastic demand functions in...

This paper establishes the ability of a Real Business Cycle model to account for real exchange rate (RXR) behaviour, using UK experience as empirical focus. We show that a productivity burst simulation is capable of explaining the appreciation of RXR and its cyclical pattern observed in the...

This Paper studies the role played by distribution costs in shaping the behaviour of the real exchange rate during exchange-rate-based stabilizations. We document that distribution costs are very large for the average consumer good: the represent more than 40% of the retail price in the US and...