The natural interest rate is of great relevance to central banks, but it is difficult to measure. We show that in a standard microfounded monetary model, the natural interest rate co-moves with a transformation of the money demand that can be computed from actual data. The co-movement is of a...

Monetary policy in the euro area is conducted within a multicountry, multicultural, and multilingual context involving multiple central banking traditions. How does this heterogeneity affect the ability of economic agents to understand and to anticipate monetary policy by the European Central...

This paper investigates the linkages between oil and growth in Congo, where there appears to be no evidence of direct spillover effects. The empirical results suggest however that political instability has a negative effect on non-oil growth, and that the presence of oil could have fueled...

The paper investigates the existence of "super pro-poor" policies-that is, policies that directly influence the income of the poor after accounting for the effect of growth. It uses a dynamic panel estimator to capture both across- and within-country effects, and a Bayesian-type robustness check...

This paper provides empirical evidence that the propensity for political instability in the Central African Republic (C.A.R.) has been increased by low tax revenues and deteriorations in the terms of trade. The direct effect of political instability on economic growth is not statistically...