The ongoing financial turmoil has triggered a lively debate on ways of containing systemic risk and lessening the likelihood of future boom-and-bust episodes in credit markets. Particularly, it has been argued that banking regulation might attenuate procyclicality in lending standards by...

In this paper, we study the co-movement of the government budget balance and the trade balance at business cycle frequencies. In a sample of 10 OECD countries we find that the correlation of the two time series is negative, but less so in more open economies. Moreover, for the US the...

We use a 12-dimensional VAR to examine the dynamic effects on the labor market of four structural technology and policy shocks. For each shock, we examine the dynamic e®ects on the labor market, the importance of the shock for labor market volatility, and the comovement between labor market...

This paper investigates the international transmission of productivity shocks in a sample of five G7 countries. For each country, using long-run restrictions, we identify shocks that increase permanently domestic labor productivity in manufacturing (our measure of tradables) relative to an...

Models of stabilization in open economy traditionally emphasize the role of exchange rates as a substitute for nominal price flexibility in fostering relative price adjustment. This view has been recently criticized on the ground that, to the extent that prices are sticky in local currency, the...

In a standard framework of international monetary policy games we show that countries will prefer to split up into several coalition blocs of a smaller size rather than forming one big coalition. Depending on the strategic position between the coalitions in an equilibrium there will be either...

This paper explores coordination problems in the transition to European Monetary Union (EMU). If incentives to undertake costly convergence and the benefits of EMU to any individual countrydepend on other countries' strategies, innefficiencies and multiple equilibria can arise. A multi-speed...

In order to understand the dynamic effects of government spending on foreign trade the present paper proceeds in two steps. First, using U.S. time series data for the post-Bretton-Woods period, the dynamic effects of government spending are investigated within a structural Vector Autoregression...

We argue that a transaction tax is likely to amplify, not dampen, volatility in the foreign exchange markets. Our argument stems from the decentralized trading practice and the presumable discrepancy between 'informed' and 'uninformed' traders' valuations. Since informed 'traders' valuations are...

In this paper we reconsider the twin deficit hypothesis (that fiscal shocks generating budget deficits also worsen external trade) both from a theoretical point of view and by analyzing data for Australia, Canada, the UK and the US. First, we assess the joint dynamics of budget and trade...